This classic Russian science fiction revolves around an alien contact from space 30 years prior to the story. The MC is Redrick, a stalker, who goes into the Zone where the aliens landed and left to retrieve detritus for the Research Institute and for the Black Market. In the first part he is collecting for the Institute until an accident ends his job; the second part is 5 years later, he's married and has a mutant daughter and working at night collecting for illegal sales; the third deals with a side character playing both sides of the fence and the last is back with Redrick on a major final trip into the Zone.

The third section is very theoretical, discussing why the aliens may have come and what their visit means to the earth. The rest is the actual events dealing with living and surviving in the area. Very interesting and thought provoking concepts but not a joyful read. ( )

I went into this totally unfamiliar with STALKER as a videogame or film. I also went into this with no prior exposure to the Strugatsky's, though I've read some other russian science fiction and fantasy translated to English. Unfortunately by folks with much more objectionable politics than the Strugatskys. A dear friend, intimately familiar with my reading preferences over the last two and a half decades, sent this to me thinking I would like it.
And they were not wrong. Its steeped in that unique blend of fatalistic optimism that oozes from certain aspects of soviet society. The characters aren't likable as heroes, but likable as real human being behaving in ways consistent with their backgrounds and environments. The treatment of the alien visitors that could care less about humans, our world, or our resources is visionary for the time, and humanity's response to the event feels all too accurate. The fact that they were writing and getting some of the underlying themes and ideas here past the soviet era censors is inspirational, and the fact that other than Ursula K. Leguin and a few others the giants of the genre at the time in the West ignored them feels criminal. Almost as criminal as many of the characters!
I've already picked up several more novels by the Strugatsky's and can't recommend this highly enough to anyone looking for a bit more cerebral, more literary scifi. ( )

When I was about fifteen I read all the SF Masterworks to be found in my nearest large library, which was most of the series. I am now attempting to fill in the gaps of books that I missed, or indeed read so quickly and superficially that I now have no memory of them. ‘Roadside Picnic’ falls into the former category. I’ve also been prompted to read it by a) mentions in an uncanny conspiracy podcast called TANIS, and b) my dad’s frequent recommendations of the Tarkovsky film Stalker. It’s an atmospheric and memorable little novel, which I think exists on a temporal and thematic continuum between Bundrys’ 1960 [b:Rogue Moon|939709|Rogue Moon|Algis Budrys|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1280105196s/939709.jpg|924687] and Vandermeer’s 2014 [b:Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy|22752442|Area X The Southern Reach Trilogy (Southern Reach, #1-3)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1412547809s/22752442.jpg|42299018]. All deal with dangerous, incomprehensible spatial encroachments of alien weirdness and the unstable people that explore them. The particular genius of ‘Roadside Picnic’, in my view, is the centrality of a black market in alien objects. The main character, Red, is a stalker, someone who ventures into the simply yet ominously named Zone and brings back objects for study or covert sale.

Inevitably I cannot resist drawing an analogy between the Zone and capitalism, which warps everyone it touches and transforms momentous scientific discoveries into petty consumer goods. This is rather specious, though, considering a brilliant conversation just over halfway through the novel about military-industrial complexes. There's also the irony of clumsily applying such an analogy given the book's origin in the USSR. The SF Masterworks edition includes an afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the struggles he and his brother went through attempting to get the novel past the soviet censors. He makes the fascinating comment that in retrospect he realises that their objections were not ideological but aesthetic. As he puts it, ‘They, those quintessential “bloody fools”, actually did think this way: that language must be as colourless, smooth, and glossy as possible and certainly shouldn’t be at all coarse; that science fiction necessarily has to be fantastic and on no account should have anything to do with crude, observable, and brutal reality; that the reader must in general be protected from reality…’

‘Roadside Picnic’ is a messy, harsh, brutal novel about first contact with aliens that humanity cannot begin to comprehend. The nature of the aliens themselves, where they came from, and where they went go unmentioned. Rather, all the characters are obsessed with what they left behind and how they might use it. There is little plot to speak of, instead the psychological and social implications of the so-called Visit are explored in microcosm. Said implications are unsettling in the extreme, on top of the Zone itself being monumentally creepy. It all adds up to a surprisingly subtle book that I think will remain in my mind for a while. ( )

This was mediocre at best until it got really bad when the unlikable main character started describing his friend's daughter's breasts. That's when I decided to call it. ( )

The movie “Stalker,” inspired by this novel, and directed by Russian film theorist Andrei Tarkovsky, is fascinating and enigmatic as far as I’m concerned; I look for both of these properties in the novel. This novel was recently selected as #1 of fifteen “best” SF novels, which inspired me to get it.

A difficult read but worthwhile for its original idea. If after reading you are tempted to see the movie “Stalker” then you are likely to be disappointed. It’s long and painfully slow and there are no alien artifacts, which removes the main reason that stalkers go to the zone. We have to believe that they can earn a living by taking clients to visit a mysterious room that grants wishes. ( )

"Want a drink?"
"Thank you, I don't drink."
"How about a smoke?"
"Sorry, I don't smoke either."
"God damn it," I say. "Then what do you need money for?" ( )

Did not work for me. Though it started out good, when the chapters skipped to years in the future, I lost interest. There did not seem to be a larger story structure and the stalking became a bit repetitive.
Hopefully, the film is better. ( )

Yes I know it's supposed to be a classic, and it certainly addresses some interesting issues on the nature of intelligence and mankind's place in the universe as alien artifacts (or alien trash?) threaten the very fabric of a society already sliding into decay. And could there be a little social satire, Soviet-style, going on as pragmatists and dreamers battle it out? But it didn't hold my interest and that final meltdown was anticlimactic. Perhaps it had more layers in the original Russian? ( )

too verbose, obviously

An entertaining story written in the USSR in the 1970s about a world that was visited briefly by an alien race that could best be described as litterbugs. The aliens never made any attempt to communicate with humans and are now long gone, but the detritus that they left has had a lasting impact. As a result the areas where they visited have been cordoned off and access is strictly limited.

Although the authors say otherwise, I wonder if the idea of the Zones stems from what happened in Chelyabinsk-40 in 1957. I read in [book:Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster|40538681] that a nuclear accident occurred in the southern Urals that resulted in the release of highly radioactive contamination across the Urals—2 million curies of it—falling in a deadly trace six kilometers wide and nearly fifty kilometers long. It resulted in the creation of a highly secret forbidden zone that sounds very similar to the forbidden zones described in this novel. I can easily imagine that news of these events would have spread about by word of mouth and that writers could incorporate them into their stories, perhaps without even knowing that they are describing something that isn't entirely fictional.

Eventually ten thousand people were ordered permanently evacuated over the course of two years. Entire settlements were plowed into the ground. Twenty-three villages were wiped from the map, and up to a half million people were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity.
Rumors of what had happened in Mayak reached the West, but Chelyabinsk-40 was among the most fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War.
Although it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the Mayak disaster remained, for many years, the worst nuclear accident in history.

The edition that I read included an introduction by the great [author:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602] that praises this book highly and includes these scathing remarks about those would reject such works out of hand.

A time, also, when a positive review of a work of Soviet science fiction was a small but real political statement in the United States, since part of the American science fiction community had undertaken to fight the Cold War by assuming every writer who lived behind the Iron Curtain was an enemy ideologue. These reactionaries preserved their moral purity (as reactionaries so often do) by not reading, so they didn’t have to see that Soviet writers had been using science fiction for years to write with at least relative freedom from Party ideology about politics, society, and the future of mankind.

My thanks to the folks at the The Evolution of Science Fiction group at Goodreads for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books. ( )

The premise of Roadside Picnic is brilliantly simple. It is a story about the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with alien life. Shortly before the story begins, aliens visit the earth, stay for a short time, then depart as suddenly as they’d arrived. What they leave behind are mysterious Zones, areas filled with invaluable technological wonders. But these areas are also filled with bizarre traps and dangers that can be instantly and brutally fatal.

Those who venture into these areas are known as stalkers (Roadside Picnic served as the inspiration for the 1979 film Stalker). It was the novel concept of deadly areas filled with priceless alien technology that drew me to the book, but it was anti-hero protagonist Red Schuhart’s personal journey that kept the plot moving.

The novel is filled with philosophical musings, and existential dread. Many consider it a novel about life within the Soviet Union but I consider it to be a novel about man's search for meaning in a universe that seems meaningless. If the Zones follow no inherent logic, and are truly "alien," then can we as rationale beings sit with this fact of unknowing? And what's the point of stalking if no scientific knowledge can be gained?

That Lovecraftian feeling of human insignificance is pervasive throughout Roadside Picnic. And it really makes for a thought provoking, atmospheric, and fast-paced read. ( )

bleak as hell. may as well not involve alien detrius, which is of course the mark of good science fiction - that the science fiction parts could easily be removed withou changing the heart of the story. i was struck throughout the book by the parallels between the zone and drug addiction. the descriptions of stalkers, the damage it does, the black market economy that gets rich off death, the desperate search for a final epiphany, a final brilliant experience... i dunno. it struck me strongly while i was reading it. maybe not a5 star book because it had too many trappings of grim dark pulp scifi with misogyny that it bothered me a bit but the story itself doesn't really involve that - it feels very human and real and involving and depressing. great book ( )

If you're a Science Fiction fan and you haven't read this yet, I recommend that you get a copy. If you're not a Science Fiction fan and you need to be convinced that Science Fiction has something to say about what it means to be human and to struggle, then this is the book for you.

Don't be misled by the title, 'Roadside Picnic' is a gritty, compelling, thought-provoking Science Fiction novella. Although this was published in 1972, in Brezhnev's Soviet Union, it feels fresh, modern and as relevant today as it was then. There's nothing escapist about 'Roadside Picnic'. It's grim and horribly plausible. It's only 172 pages long but it's so immersive and the world it brings to life is so dark that it feels like a much longer read.

The story takes place some years after 'The Visit', the name given to an event where aliens landed at five points around the world, stayed for a short time without making any contact and then departed. Two things soon became clear: the landing sites, known as Zones, had been contaminated in such a way that they produced strange phenomena that were often lethal and that alien artefacts with remarkable attributes lay scattered around the Zones. At the time of the story, the UN has sealed off the Zones to contain contamination and to control access to the artefacts.

The story focuses not on the scientist trying to make sense of the Visit and the properties and contents of the Zones, but on a Red Schuhart. a Stalker, someone who enters the Zone illegally to retrieve alien atrefacts and either sell them to the UN or on the black market.

Red isn't a hero, he's a survivor. He's a pragmatic, smart young man, risking his life to make money by doing illegal things in a lethal environment.

Red is a realist. He knows how the world works. He knows that the only things he can depend on are his own wits and his own courage. He's powered not by hope but by a determination to survive. He refuses to give way to rage at the unfairness of his situation and instead focuses on taking a deep breath so that he can think things through and avoid making a mistake.

Red gets through his days with the aid of a flask of alcohol and by focusing on providing for his family. We follow him over a series of years as he journeys into the Zone, risking death, betrayal and imprisonment. Red knows that the Zone should be being exploited by scientists to advance knowledge for the benefit of all mankind but that he is helping to pillage it for the short-term advantage of a greedy few who have no regard for the safety of others.

Why does he do this? To survive. He believes that mankind's greatest achievement is that it is still alive and plans to stay that way. He recognises that the need to survive makes him vulnerable to exploitation by the greedy who see the Zones as a zero-sum game. He would like things to be different but he has to deal with the world as it is.

Red's struggle is a very human one. He is a man with no resources and no opportunities, running the lethal mazes of money and need, learning to rely only on himself. He is aware of but is detached from the agenda of the scientists and officials. He knows he is being used as a tool by scientists and officials and by the wealthy looking to get wealthier by any means. He is resigned to constantly struggling against bureaucracy and law enforcement and occasionally losing his freedom.

Most of the book is taken up with Red's struggle. We watch as, year after year, he is ground down by his environment. For a while, he is sustained by his love for his family but even they eventually become as much a burden as a blessing. With no other options left, Red treks into the Zone to find an artefact with mythical qualities that might provide him with a way out, if he can survive, if he's willing to pay the price and if he can decide what to wish for.

I found Red's story compelling. It felt real, in a grimy, I'm-so-glad-this-isn't-my-life way. I'm not surprised that the version of the book published in 1972 had sections removed or changed by the Soviet censors. I'm very glad that the English translation worked with the original text.

So, why is this book called 'Roadside Picnic' and not 'Stalker' (which was the name used by the subsequent movie and video game)?

The explanation comes during a short interlude in the story that is not focused on Red. In it, a Zone entrepreneur/fixer and a physics Nobel Laureate discuss The Visit over a drunken lunch. The inclusion of this scene felt a little clumsy but the content made it irresistible. The physicist explains The Visit as analogous to a roadside picnic. The aliens were taking a rest stop. They were not there to contact humanity and had no interest in staying. The Zones are just the places where they left their trash. Humanity watched them from afar and is now busy picking over the rubbish and pollution that the aliens left behind, in the hope of finding miracles.

My first reaction to this was - 'What an original take of First Contact'.

Then my inner atheist cleared his throat and I saw that it was more than that. In a sense, all of human history is a Roadside Picnic, provided you reject the idea of an interventionist God or Gods. Mankind in general and scientists and engineers in particular, have spent centuries picking over the shape of a world created by forces completely indifferent to their existence to find something miraculous that will help them to survive. ( )

Excellent book, last chapter is intense and a hazy revelation. ( )

A strange, slightly halting novel, essentially composed of four days' narrative across eight years. I picked this up after hearing the excellent episode on it for the Backlisted podcast, having also seen Tarkovsky's film Stalker several times and thinking, generally, I might find it interesting.

And interesting it definitely is, although the book manages to be both like and unlike what I had anticipated. Since Backlisted made some overt comparisons to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I had perhaps expected more of a tonal similarity: the creeping horror and dread, the sense that the characters' senses may be betraying them. There's a little bit of that here, but it's consumed much more in a kind of crushingly banal hopelessness. Why did the aliens come? No one knows. Will they be back? No one knows. What does it all mean? No one knows. Does anyone care about anything anymore? No one knows... It's a very bleak narrative, all the more so because the characters are aware it will probably get even bleaker. The horror isn't creeping: it's everywhere.

i think a much stronger point of comparison would be the contemporaneous novels of Philip K. Dick. Dick had a peculiar way of depicting a world that was always about 15% out of joint, mostly quite recognizable but with new ideas or concepts introduced a terribly offhand manner. There were rarely any "establishing shots" in a Dickian novel; you were left to grasp at thin pieces of description or make guesses from context clues. That kind of thing is all over Roadside Picnic: what's hell slime? What's prickly heat? Who's the Gopher? Why is someone named Four-Eyes? Is a "reanimated corpse" slang, or a literal description? You get some sort of answer for all of these, but sometimes they're half-answers, and sometimes they're almost non-answers, where you're left to make terrible assumptions of your own based on a few fragments of data.

is it a good book? Well, this modern 2003 translation reads easily, and it definitely leaves you thinking. But a lot of its "appeal" is in depicting people at their most basic, trying to survive in a world they don't understand, trying to comprehend and sometimes ignore its inherent bleakness. There's a powerful metaphor there, so yes, I think it's fair to say it's a good book and one that will stick with you a while. But it'd also be reasonable for you to put down the book at the end and say, "Is that all there is?" The plot really isn't very much, or terribly important. It's the overall effect of it, and the unanswered questions of it, and the melancholy of it, that will stick with you. ( )

Another one of those "classic" sci fi novels that I'm glad I read because it is an important book to the genre and has a lot to say, but I probably won't ever touch again. I enjoyed a lot of elements of it, but the third section (there's four sections total) contributed absolutely nothing in my opinion and I'm still trying to understand its purpose. It's pretty easy to see how much this book influenced future writings. I actually enjoyed the afterward by Boris Strugatsky more than the book itself, discussing the difficulties in getting the book published at the height of Soviet realism gripping their art culture. ( )

Dark and gritty Soviet science fiction. It has a video game-like quality. The characters and their nicknames are well-conceived. The overall crushing cynicism has a Russian feel to it. ( )

Interesting idea, well executed. Thinly veiled comment on the Russian societal background. ( )

Awesome world and story. I'm still just discovering Russian sci-fi, but this is already one of my favorites. ( )

Super creative dark science fiction. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/roadside-picnic-by-arkady-and-boris-strugatsky/

One of the classic sf works of Eastern Europe, well indeed of the world, which I realised that I had never actually read in English – when living in Germany in 1986 I bought a German translation, which is probably the most recent work of any length that I have read in German.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. There have been some notable incomprehensible alien incursion stories since, thinking of Ian McDonald, Jeff VanderMeer and Tade Thompson in particular, but this is the first really detailed exploration of what the SF Encyclopedia calls a Zone. The aliens have come and gone, leaving obscure and dangerous objects for us to look at and attempt to exploit; the effect this has on the immediate human society of those who try to explore it is brutally depicted. It’s interesting that the characters are coded as Americans, even in the original Russian. It’s also mercifully short. ( )

The book is brilliant, and is not quite something I expected. You can, if you wish, try and find hidden messages in the book, about communism or totalitarian regimes, but I don't think this was the intent behind the story.

The story is, itself, mesmerizing, and almost surreal. The premise is simple. A scavenger - Redskin - goes into the Zone, picking up artefacts left by an alien visitation. The effect of these artefacts damaging for his daughter, and he goes one last time into the Zone, for her sake.

There are some excellent passages on humanity in the book, and it is well worth reading. Suspend rational thought, and enjoy the ride. ( )

I had encountered enough references to Roadside Picnic for it to have been on my wishlist for years. It was clearly an influence on some of my favorite 21st-century sf, notably VanderMeer's Annihilation* and Harrison's Nova Swing.

The version I read was the 2012 "new translation" which freed the original Russian text from hostile Soviet publisher's edits. An afterword by Boris Strugatsky provides a partial account of the authors' struggle with publishing authorities. It wasn't Soviet political ideology they ran afoul of. LeGuin in her 2012 foreword (drawing on a 1977 review) calls the story "indifferent to ideology" (vi), and it is in fact rather hostile to liberal economics and bourgeois morality. Surprisingly, it was a blinkered escapist editorial aesthetic that interfered with the Strugatskys' work in the publishing environment of 1970s Soviet sf.

On the whole, I read the book's philosophy to be one of cosmic indifferentism verging on existentialism. The "stalker" protagonist Red isn't really an anti-hero, although he is a criminal without revolutionary aspirations. A "stalker" in this book is a freelance looter of artifacts resulting from the Visit by some inscrutable extraterrestrial power. The book is short and reads quickly, with a prologue for some background and four longish chapters set over a twelve-year span in the town of Harmont, which has been partly absorbed by one of the Zones of alien effects and residues.

I haven't seen the Tartovsky film Stalker (1979) based on this book, but I am now curious to do so. To no small degree, the story strikes me as what you'd get if Eugene O'Neill wrote a science fiction novel.

* Edited to add: I gather that VanderMeer has disavowed familiarity with Roadside Picnic when writing Annihilation. In any case, the resonance is strong enough to have been remarked by multiple reviewers.

What's most amazing about this book is how the authors write prose that is so thought-provoking but not at all heavy. I might rate it 4 stars for that alone, but add to that the solid, lean prose, interesting characters and the compelling mysteries of the zone, and it's definitely a 5 for me. ( )