157 pages
Published 1968
Read from April 19 to April 20
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Ancient Greek warrior Alyx, formerly a rogue from a Bronze Age sword & sorcery city, is a Trans-Temporal Agent assigned to escort a group of rich tourists through the mountains of a vacation planet turned war zone. Thanks to the combatants’ futuristic sensors, she can’t employ metal or strike a fire. She has to wield synthetic daggers and crossbows, and babysit spoiled future folk utterly alien to her: people bereft of curiosity and imagination, people who’ve never had to just survive before, people who only want to talk about themselves and their issues with self-esteem.
The gist of Alyx’s conflict — comfort and civilization and self-help psychology have made everyone big and dumb and soft, unsuited for the hard tasks of survival, forcing her to bully and tyrannize them for their own good — is standard twentieth century sci-fi, nothing I haven’t read in one form or another most of my life.
What Russ brings to Picnic is the literary verve of her prose, the dexterity with which she sketches the clashing personalities, and (revolutionary for sci-fi in 1968) a focus on emotional intelligence. One of the future tourists’ collective weaknesses is inability to face their emotions. Crying is an essential survival tool, the first step in facing facts and moving forward. When one tourist dies, Alyx spends hours comforting her daughter, despite the urgency of their escape. I can’t imagine any masculine sci-fi story from this era (or any era prior to, say, the 1990s) letting its characters mourn on the page.
Of course, it has to be said that the central conflict is exacerbated by Alyx’s brutal methods of bringing her “picnickers” to their senses. Carefully beating her clients to snap them out of a spiral happens more than once. The juxtaposition between the drug-numbed future folk and Alyx’s Bronze Age belligerence is deliberate, a storytelling choice underlined when Alyx is faced with her own grief.
No comments:
Post a Comment