Tildes Book Club: Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

I was going to see how this one turns out first before deciding whether to continue or not. But unless something goes catastrophically wrong, I think I will likely be continuing it so long as there is still interest.

As for how the book club chooses the next book, I'm not entirely sure. But I think this comment of mine below sums up my general feelings on it:

Yeah, you're not alone in being hesitant to commit to a particular book. And I think picking books that are too much of a commitment is probably why most book clubs (esp online) eventually fall apart, since it starts feeling like homework instead of reading for fun. And yeah, the cost and accessibility is another issue too. But that's precisely why I thought Roadside Picnic was an ideal book to pick, since it's only 224 pages (which is only slightly longer than a typical novella), available in a bunch of languages, relatively inexpensive, and also written by long-dead authors so can be pirated guilt-free.

But I have never ran, or even participated in, a book club before. So if you or anyone else has any suggestion for how best to run it, or how best to pick the next book, I am all ears!

Yeah, Libby or hoopla are probably the best place for people to get their hands on it, if they live in North America and have a library card. That's where I get most of my ebooks (and graphic novels) these days too.

p.s. I recently discovered you can read Libby books on your kindle device if you live in the US. That feature is unfortunately not available in Canada yet though. :(

Awesome. You and anyone else that is interested in joining us are more than welcome!

There are still ~2 weeks until I post the discussion topic so there should still be plenty of time to read the book. But it should be noted that nobody is actually obligated to finish reading it by then. With the Activity sort and "Collapse old comments" feature, people can simply join in on the discussion whenever they're finally done, and it can continue for as long as people are still interested in commenting and replying. :)

Looking forward to hear some fresh takes on it!

Ditto. Although it's been quite a few years since I last read it, so I'm actually looking forwards to rereading it myself as well. :P

If this book club event turns out well, I was planning on opening the floor for suggestions for the next book we could potentially read, in a separate topic afterwards. But a short story, several of them, or even an anthology would also work too... and I am always down for reading more scifi! So if you can hold off for a month, you would be more than welcome to add your own suggestions for short stories about AI to that next book club topic, once I post it.

Nice! Looking forward to hearing what you think of it. :)

However, the only problem with that copy is you'll miss out on the foreward written by Ursula K. Le Guin, which adds some interesting context to the novel. So in order to share that, I'll quickly write it out for you and anyone else interested in reading it:

FOREWARD

BY USULA K. LE GUIN

Part of this forward is taken from a review or Roadside Picnic I wrote in 1977, the year the book first came out in English. I wanted to keep some record of a reader's response at a time when the worst days of Soviet censorship were fresh in memory, and intellectually and morally interesting novels from Russia still had the glamour of risk-taking courage about them. A time, also, when a positive view of a work of Soviet science fiction was a small but real political statement in the United State, since part of the American science fiction community had undertaken to fight the Cold War by assuming every writer who lived behind the Iron Curtain was an enemy ideologue. These reactionaries preserved their moral purity (as reactionaries so often do) by not reading, so they didn't have to see that Sovier writers had been using science fiction for years to write with at least relative freedom from Party ideology about politics, society, and the future of mankind.

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can't afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it's all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government's policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men.

***

And what follows from there is kinda getting into spoiler territory since it's just a copy of her old review of the book. So, I will simply link to that review, and people can read it or not read it at their own discretion:

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/12/leguin12.htm
(I would recommend not reading it until after you have read the book yourself)

p.s. Le Guin is mistaken about the Strugatsky brothers never being blatant, or directly critical of their government's policies though. Their next novel, The Doomed City was about as blatantly critical as it gets... but to be fair to her, the brothers kept that novel a total secret (supposedly even from family and friends) due to their fears about releasing something so inflammatory, and so it wasn't even published in Russia until 16 years later in 1989, at the tail end of perestroika, when they finally felt it was safe for them to do so. And it wasn't translated to and published in English until rather recently (2016), so it's not surprising she didn't know about it when she wrote the foreward.

Did you mean to post this here, or in the new Discussion topic?