Roadside Picnic
[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian] > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explanation. No one saw the visitors. Their presence caused disease and blindness in the areas where they landed. Now, in the six "Zones", the laws of physics (and, seemingly, of reality) are disturbed by anomalies, and littered with inexplicable, deadly wreckage. Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale. Some of these artefacts offer the promise of extraordinary powers. Unlike Tarkovsky's film, which concentrates on the hallucinatory, vacated landscape of the zones, the novels portray a society adapting to an inexplicable, terrifying event, an eruption of the unknown. Though written in 1971 and published in English in 1977, the novel was heavily bowdlerised by Soviet censors, and an authoritative text wasn't available in Russian until 2000.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Roadside Picnic
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Aliens visited Earth, did not get out of their cars, and left strange dangerous areas behind. The novel follows Red Schuhart, a scavenger who sneaks into the Zone to bring out artifacts no one understands.
Roadside Picnic was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and originally published in Russian in 1972. The novel is widely considered one of the great Soviet science fiction novels and influenced many later post-contact stories.
Yes. Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is loosely based on Roadside Picnic, with the Strugatsky brothers writing the screenplay. The Stalker video games are also inspired by the novel and film.
Roadside Picnic is 179 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Roadside Picnic takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Roadside Picnic is a standalone novel by Аркадий Натанович Стругацкий, not part of a series.
Roadside Picnic is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.