There was an extraterrestrial event known as the Visitation. In it’s aftermath, six “zones” have come into being on Earth – dangerous areas where unexplained phenomena occur and there are strange objects with supernatural properties.
Official labs spring up to study these zones, but they aren’t the only people interested in what can be found inside. Stalkers – freelancers that sneak into the zones and recover artifacts to sell to interested private parties – pop up as well, despite the extreme risk involved.
Redrick “Red” Schuhart is one such stalker. A hard, frequently angry man who drinks like a fish but tries to be fair and honorable, as much as he can in the circumstances. At several points throughout the book Red is committed to not going into the zone again, but time after time he gets pulled back in for various reasons.
Roadside Picnic was written by the Strugatsky brothers in the Soviet Union in 1971 and published in 1972. It was translated to English in the late 1970s.
The initial versions of the book were heavily censored. However, in the 1990s it was finally published in its original form.
Roadside Picnic is science fiction, but it doesn’t really concern itself with the how question of anything it puts forth. The characters grapple with some of the implications of the zone and the objects inside it, but they never come to any hard conclusions. The zone and its effects just ARE.
The book is therefore about the characters and the town and how being next to such a bizarre place effects them over time.
The prose and style of the book survive the translation quite well, depicting blunt, harsh characters in a tough environment well. The pacing is a bit odd, with some fits and starts between its various sections, but the book evokes an interesting feeling throughout its relatively short page length.
Roadside Picnic is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Sci-Fi that gives the reader a feeling of wonder, and anyone that likes reading stories about how characters and places change over time in response to a new stimulus.
(Roadside Picnic was adapted into the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, and was the basis for the Stalker series of video games, though both of these are loose adaptations and change a fair amount of details)
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