Roadside Picnic

I think this was the first proper sci-fi novel I've ever read. After Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was released I was curious about the novel it was inspired by. I was maybe 14 and didn't like the book much. Wasn't used to this writing style, I guess.

It's very dense and the story is split into four chapters, each skipping some time ahead. A lot of it are main character's monologues in his head but it's well written and well translated so it never got dull, maybe with exception of part 3 which is from different character's perspective and essentially serves as info dump about the zone, it's effects and changes in the world throughout the years since it showed up.

I'm now more than twice that age and on second read enjoyed the book a lot more except for the ending. Even Stephen King writes better ones. But it doesn't ruin the story. It was just more of a whimper than a bang.

This story was inventive and gripping! Due to its rocky publication history in the Soviet Union, it's quite possible that it didn't actually influence such works as [b:The Dark Tower 43615 The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) Stephen King https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554220416l/43615.SY75.jpg 46575] series, [b:Annihilation 17934530 Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) Jeff VanderMeer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403941587l/17934530.SX50.jpg 24946895], and Stranger Things, but the Strugatskys' vision of The Zone, full of wonders and nightmares, may be the most revolutionary and inventive evocation of these ideas.Looking in the opposite direction on our literary timeline, this would seem to owe a lot to H.P. Lovecraft (though I don't know if the authors read him): aliens who have no interest in humanity, and indeed may be so far beyond us that they missed our existence entirely during their visit; aliens who could be from another dimension, or more akin to demons, rather than your standard issue Martians (one artifact is literally called “hell-slime”); mysterious infective and mutagenic qualities that are never understood by the characters and never explained to the reader; all this adding up to an atmosphere of scientific curiosity overcome by creeping dread.The story doesn't coddle the reader - there's a quick journalistic interlude to give us an idea of what happened to create The Zone, and then we're off to the races, seeing it up close through the eyes of various characters, most notably Red Schuhart. Red is often relatable but far from virtuous, and most of the people around him inhabit shades of gray, giving the story texture and making it feel gritty and real, despite the dreamy aspects of The Zone. As we slowly glean information from the discussions of the area and its treasures, we get a picture of the cosmic, the political, and the personal colliding.There are a few irritants. The sexism grows more virulent as the story progresses, and only fails to overwhelm the story because the greatest example of misogyny here is the near-absence of women. We get glimpses of female characters only in relation to the men who are actually doing things, and the stereotypes are so hackneyed as to be self parody: the long-suffering wife who cooks and cleans and worries (but only silently!); the adorable daughter who needs protection; the secretary addressed as “my dear” and mollified by chocolates; and of course The Slut, whom Red dismisses as an empty shell even as he completes a creepily comprehensive inventory of her physical form.The racism is a little less in-your-face, again due to the dearth of characters of color, rather than any sensitivity. Black men appear in the background as lackeys and enforcers, and the one named character is a religious lunatic and drunkard.I found the last chapter to be utterly absorbing, but the finale to be a little abrupt. I admit this may be due to my copy having an extensive afterword, which led me to believe I still had about an hour of reading ahead of me as I approached the end of the story. Either way, I do think the ambiguity of the ending is pretty appropriate. There are no neat explanations or clear chains of cause and effect in The Zone.

Apparently, the two most popular Russian SF novels are this one and another that I read, [b:Monday Starts on Saturday 18215601 Monday Starts on Saturday Arkady Strugatsky https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1517066137s/18215601.jpg 1039633].I didn't care for either very much. Mostly for the same reason. I always felt as if I had missed a chapter, everything felt like it almost made sense.There were a couple of parts I liked, an interesting discussion of why the aliens might have visited and one of those reasons explains the title. I also liked the addendum on the difficulties of getting something published in Soviet Russia.I think I would have appreciated these books more if I had grown up in Soviet Russia in the 70's.

The Strugatsky brothers were Russian, but this novel has been translated remarkably well into colloquial American by Antonina W. Bouis.

The story concerns the after-effects of a ‘visitation' from another solar system. No extraterrestrial creatures appear in the story, nor are they recorded as having been witnessed; but six places on Earth are suddenly and terribly transfigured. Within each Visitation Zone, strange and deadly things exist; many things which kill, and some artifacts which are apparently products of a technology more advanced than ours, and therefore of great value.

The story is set in the vicinity of one of these Zones (in Canada, for no obvious reason), and concerns the cautious and perilous exploration and exploitation of the Zone by two rival groups: government scientists, and criminal adventurers out to make a fortune on the black market.

One of the scientists suggests that the Zones are abandoned picnic sites—the aliens dropped in one night, then went their way oblivious of humanity, carelessly leaving their litter behind.

Whatever the explanation, over a period of years the Zones become almost familiar parts of life. Common types of artifact are familiarly named, some are understood and used, others are used without being understood, others are too lethal to touch. The book dwells on the seedy lives of the desperadoes who sneak into the nightmare world of the Zone for death or profit. It's very vivid, very believable, and would translate easily into a film (given a good special effects budget). I regret to say that I finished it with much the same reaction that humanity displayed to the Visitation: it's powerful, but what does it mean?

(Review originally written in 1985)

I didn't finish this one. Something was just off about the combination of the slightly weird prose (translation, probably trying to mimic the style of the original) and the way I couldn't get a sense of how the interactions were meant to go between characters. The way the protagonist talked to others just gave me absolutely zero sense of where he was standing.
I will probably try it again later.

What if we missed our first contact with aliens? Would it change what it means to be human, or will we just keep going about our little human lives? And what does it mean to be human anyway?

Roadside Picnic imagines a world that has apparently been visited by aliens, but the only evidence of this is the odd spaces and artifacts they left behind.


The story is primarily told through Redrick, a “stalker” who goes into the zones and brings back odd artifacts for money. It's a dangerous job, but he's more concerned about doing right by his family and friends than he is about getting crushed by a gravity anomaly or other strange occupational hazard. He's a gruff, stoical man, with some character traits (casual violence, objectifying women) that have aged poorly, like so many protagonists from the mid 20th century. But he's clearly more compassionate than he lets on, and it's obvious that he's what this society would consider a good man.

Told through him, the narration swaps between his moment-to-moment point of view and more narrative reflections, such that we understand his state of being well enough, but never quite know what's going to happen next. It can feel jarring from time to time, but it works well with the strange and mysterious setting of “the zone.”


For one chapter in the middle of the book, the perspective changes to a morally questionable businessman as he makes his way through his day. I found this portion to be the most enjoyable because it widens our view of the world enough to get a clear grip of what's going on, and briefly, it really leans into the philosophies underlying the whole scenario. There's a classic Socratic discourse between people of varying drunkenness at one point, and those 10ish pages really tied the whole story together for me.


Roadside Picnic is both uniquely of its time, and timeless. Being written in Soviet Russia, but taking place in North America, the story draws an interesting sketch of what Russians thought life was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and the Afterword describes the trials of the soviet publishing industry in fascinatingly mundane detail. But the story isn't special because of its cultural connection. It's special because it took a standard sci-fi trope and made it into a poignant statement about the human condition.

Have been wanting to read this since falling in love with Tarkovsky' “Stalker” and found it just as gripping as the movie (though the similarities are less pronounced than you may expect). Everything that comes out of Roadside Picnic has such a singular mood (run down, labor oriented, darkly humorous, pessimistic about if technology is improving society), and the book does a great job sketching its world just sharply enough to ground the reader while rarely adding uneeded specificity. Everyone is screwed and scrappy and only seeing half of how they fit into the industrial machine they power.

I don't know enough about Soviet fiction to speak to what histories this book is in conversation with. The analogies that spring to mind feel both too obvious to be interesting and too flat for how ambiguous so much about The Zone and it's impact remain. Will be interested to see what interpretations have sprouted up over the last several decades, but even as just a sensory experience Roadside Picnic is riveting.

Mais uma vez a condição humana. Mas porém o tópico é diferente. O mundo é destópico e hostil é habitação regular, as pessoas presssistem e querem ser os indivíduos da forma que vieram a ser. Quando o mundo ou o seu país os tentam mudar à força existe resistência e por vezes essa mesma resistência fará parte do conceito do indivíduo. É assim que encontramos Schuhart, um Stalker porque em seu tempo passou a ser Stalker e não porque aspirava a ser Stalker. Seu desejo pessoal é revolucionário às normas mas seu último desejo é o de uma alma que sofrera tudo.

I enjoyed reading this after seeing Tarkovsky's STALKER. The film focuses on the Zone, and its unbearable pressure on the stalkers. But Roadside Picnic is focused much more on Redrick and his struggles outside of being a stalker. I wonder how much that comes down the refining a story — the authors wrote this over a year or so. And they came up with an excellent story, albeit a bit dry and slow. What if they'd waited a year and then rewrote it? Created a new story in the same vein? Would it be better? Different?

I've been thinking a lot about how people find niches to excel in. Sometimes that's their one world, or it's a certain kind of furniture, or some particular software. I liked the book but I enjoyed the movie more. Why?