Roadside Picnic

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.