'K. So where to start?

So is there any subtext in the story relating to communism, soviet society, or the political landscape of the world at the time?

Oh god. Is there.

It's worthwhile to look at RP in context - rather than an isolated book about overwhelming technology from an uncaring, unseeing alien race, it's one of many books about overwhelming technology from an uncaring, unseeing alien race.

RP was published in 1971. Two years previously, Robert Silverberg published The Man in the Maze. A year later, Arthur C. Clarke published Rendezvous with Rama. Even those don't exist in isolation - off the top of my head, Clifford Simak's "Big Front Yard" (1959) and Robert Heinlein's "And He Built A Crooked House" (1941) are seminal short stories about bizarrely alien technology and our reactions to it. So here's where it gets interesting.

RP ('71) is all about alien technology that mostly kills people, found in a place that used to be home but now kills people, that tears people apart and destroys lives while intellectuals uselessly study it. If that's not a Soviet metaphor, I don't know what is. Compare and contrast -

- "And He Built A Crooked House" ('41) is about an architect that accidentally assembles a tesseract, which he and his friends cheerfully explore. Heinlein lived in LA during the epic of Case Study Houses and the triumph of Greene & Greene.

- "Big Front Yard" ('59)is about a yankee antique trader whose house is the site of an alien crash. They use parts from a television he's fixing to open a portal to another dimension. The aliens obligingly make the B&W TV color in exchange for using its parts and the yankee trader ventures forth into an intergalactic marketplace where alien races exchange ideas.

- Man In The Maze (1969)is about a hero who lives amongst the first aliens we ever encounter and ends up broadcasting evil thoughts. He retreats to the ruins of an ancient civilization designed to protect its inhabitants using lethal alien force. When another, superior alien race shows up, an expedition attempts to lure him out to prevent destruction of the human race.

- Rendezvous with Rama (1973) is about a research vessel out past the orbit of Uranus that is sent to investigate an alien craft cruising through the solar system to use the Sun as a gravity slingshot. The crew has a brief window to explore Man's first alien contact.

The Western stories (even Maze, bleak as it is) are hopeful. They presume interstellar cooperation. There's a sense of fairness - even "the man in the maze" has his hubris and arrogance explored (it is, after all, a retelling of Sophocles' "Philoctetes"). Alien technology is alien, but it's alien and indifferent, not alien and "Witch's Jelly." The maze in MitM is designed purely for punishment and antagonism of other races, but it's logical. Rama presupposes a universal government and an international project to repel meteors and speaks of an international project to drain the Mediterranean for an expanding human race. "Yankee traders", innovative architects, pigeon-chested space captains, tragic heroes - this is the stuff of hopefulness.

Roadside Picnic, on the other hand, is about the uselessness of The State, the naivete of science, the essential nature of the black market and the victory of cynicism over idealism. Red is basically a guy trying to make a living and it costs him everything. Buzzard is basically a sociopathic opportunist and he's the last one left standing.

What's interesting to me is if you look up "Roadside Picnic" and "nuclear" you get a bunch of people writing about how the novel has taken on a "new resonance" since the Chernobyl disaster. Nobody, it seems, has pointed out what a catastrophe the Soviet nuclear program was prior to Chernobyl. Chelyabinsk was basically Chernobyl in 1957, except they kept the reactors open and kept fucking around with them. And while all this stuff was secret, Soviet military/industrial disasters were commonplace.

I'd go as far as to hypothesize that the novel is a reaction to the Soviet nuclear program. Two years before it was written there was a nasty accident on a Soviet icebreaker. At the time, the Soviets were handing out little potbellied stoves full of cesium chloride for seed irradiation, and had thermocouples running off strontium-90 to power remote installations. There was quite a dustup in 2001 when hunters found one out in the woods, cuddled up to it overnight and gave themselves leukemia.

Radiotherapy thefts were almost commonplace in the '60s. My parents were in Brazil when junk scavengers raided a hospital and came out with a bunch of Cesium 137. Large portions of Sao Paolo (if I recall correctly) had to be evacuated and screened because the thieves cracked open their stash and found glowing blue stuff that they painted their children with. Pretty sure that was '68. In a very real sense, the thieves were "stalkers."

Seen in that light, Roadside Picnic isn't just a story that says "science is bad" it's a story that says "nuclear energy will destroy us body and soul and while our government is too focused on shiny baubles, our necessary human nature will let the contagion escape past even the meager defenses provided by the State to kill us all slowly." If I were an apparatchik I'd ban it, too.

What's the deal with Red and the Zone?

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union managed to take Russia from one of the world's largest grain exporters to one of the world's largest grain importers in the space of ten years. The USSR wasn't a socialist state, it was a kleptocracy run via oligarchy. Red is an ordinary citizen, thrust by happenstance into a bad situation that he attempts to make the most of. He has no real options and when he tries to work within the system, his only friend in the world is killed. The only opportunities available to him are illegal. There's no safety net for his family. The State can't even treat his dead with respect.

Roadside Picnic is a Soviet version of It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey doesn't have the resources to open a bank, the only people looking out for him are the ones trying to throw him in jail, where ZuZu is steadily dragged down into inhumanity for the crimes of her father and in which Donna Reed has to give hand jobs to her boss in order to keep food on the table. Clarence isn't a guardian angel looking out for George, he's an unthinking, unseeing and indifferent force of omnipotence that exists solely to kill George by accident in ways mankind has never conceived before.

Red keeps going back to The Zone because it's the only thing he can do. USSR in a nutshell.