Roadside Picnic

224 pages

English language

Published April 8, 2012

ISBN:: 978-0-575-09313-3

(1 review)

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.

2 editions

Tak! reviewed Roadside Picnic by Boris Strugatsky

3 stars

Roadside Picnic reads like a love letter to functional alcoholism.

The basic premise is that there were a series of isolated visitations to earth by unknown aliens, who subsequently fucked off and never came back. However, the places where they visited are now strewn with various items and phenomena that behave inexplicably to modern science, in ways that are often extremely dangerous to humans.

In addition to scientists coming to study the visitation zones, this also results in a black market for harvested technology, with people ("stalkers") sneaking in to exfiltrate things at great personal risk.

It's clear that this is if nothing else a spiritual predecessor to Annihilation. Everything is focused around the weird and often brutally inscrutable, with no explanation required or given. It definitely shows its age (and possibly cultural origin), especially in terms of attitudes about gender roles.

The translation was very good imo. I was …

Roadside Picnic reads like a love letter to functional alcoholism.

The basic premise is that there were a series of isolated visitations to earth by unknown aliens, who subsequently fucked off and never came back. However, the places where they visited are now strewn with various items and phenomena that behave inexplicably to modern science, in ways that are often extremely dangerous to humans.

In addition to scientists coming to study the visitation zones, this also results in a black market for harvested technology, with people ("stalkers") sneaking in to exfiltrate things at great personal risk.

It's clear that this is if nothing else a spiritual predecessor to Annihilation. Everything is focused around the weird and often brutally inscrutable, with no explanation required or given. It definitely shows its age (and possibly cultural origin), especially in terms of attitudes about gender roles.

The translation was very good imo. I was a little apprehensive after having read a terrible translation of Metro 2033, but no complaints on that front.