Roadside Picnic

The central symbol representing the alien visitation is that of a roadside picnic. In Valentine’s view, the Visit was a leisure-like pastime for the aliens, one where they probably didn’t even notice humanity’s presence, and certainly haven’t thought about it since departing.

While Valentine frames the Visit in many ways, the Visit as a picnic is probably the most evocative, hence the authors’ decision to use the framing device as the book’s title. Because the aliens’ intentions, psychology, and purpose of their technology is unfathomable, the closest readers can come to imagining what it’s like for the book’s characters to encounter the Zone and its contents is to try to place themselves in the head of a woodland creature, or even an insect coming upon the garbage from a picnic. Most of what one of these creatures might find will be useless, the object of curiosity at best. Some of it, like broken glass, is deadly. With zero notion of the containers and products made from glass, it will seem like nothing more than a source of gratuitous pain and death, when in fact the substance has utility for its owners. And even that which may be useful—perhaps a creature manages to use a piece of discarded newspaper to build their nest—will be applied in a way that has nothing to do with its original purpose.