145 pages
English language
Published April 8, 2000
A troubled man leads a writer and a scientist into "The Zone", a mysterious area where the laws of physics no longer apply. All three journey towards "The Room", which supposedly has the power to fulfill the innermost wishes of anyone who enters therein.
I enjoyed this a lot. It's surprising the level of world building that's achieved here given the length. The chapters are long and few, and each one gives you something different to take away about the Zone, how it affects regular people, and how some have learned to take advantage of it.
This is a second Slovenian translation of Roadside Picnic and this time we got uncensored version of the book translated by the same translator. It has a very informative foreword which speaks about the fight that brothers Strugacky with the Soviet Union state bureaucracy to get this work published. What is really interested is that the censors in the end took out the bad language in the swear words. Roadside picnic is, according to the foreword, one of the few books that won the battle against censorship. The book is apolitical with slight anti-capitalist subtone so it is hard to imagine why it was not approved by the censors in the first place.
Regarding the book itself it is very gripping sci-fi thriller that questions what is humanity. It is almost at the top of my suggestion list.
Man, this book just exudes atmosphere. The way the story is told over time is great. Highly recommend.
Nothing short of amazing.
If I had to pick one word to describe Roadside Picnic, it would be clever. All about this book feels rascalous, chaotic, full of energy and vitality. I think the main theme here is how people and culture can adapt to almost anything. No matter how bleak, odd or desperate the situation, the spark of life can be found in the most unexpected of places and that's something I'd gladly take to my heart from this book, especially in these trying times.
Reading this book in today's world actually seems to be sensible, as we careen into the abyss. The novella's premise is thought provoking, and the characters are 'warped' (in an interesting way).
Aliens visit earth and leave again, as if they were just stopping for a picnic along the way to somewhere more interesting. The people living near the visited sites (Zones) find all sorts of mysterious and often dangerous things left behind that shatter our concepts of physics and the possibilities of life. Scientists are no better off than anyone else tring to understand them. And that's the crux of it - when humans are so insignificant, so far away from understanding reality, there is really very little separating us. I've typed and deleted a few more things but felt like it cheapened the book's themes because ultimately I think they are affective rather than ideological. So I'll just keep them to myself.
Second read, the sense of absurdist normalcy around incomprehensible change drives every scene and is just gripping.
I put the review in the finished book comment. I may be stupid.
Really good modern translation (idk maybe the original reads that way too) but very cool to see all those little bits that have seeped into modern scifi everywhere
This is a great Science Fiction book ! An unputdownable page turner. Good story, good character development, very well written. I enjoyed it a lot, read it in two sittings :)
A pretty solid soviet science fiction novel, in which prospectors referred to as Stalkers explore and retrieve artifacts from the Zone, the site of an alien visitation event years in the past. It has just the right amount of science fiction terminology, concepts and lore to string the reader along, but it's strength really is the character's interior voices and social commentary. I listened to the audiobook version with an afterword by one of the authors and found it particularly insightful.
Interesting idea, but the prose is uneven (though that may be due to the translation) and the characters are both unconvincing and unlikeable, making it hard work to engage with the story.
Two decades have passed since the Visitation, when aliens visited Earth. The landscape has been left permanently altered. The so-called "Zones" remain quarantined, full of extraterrestrial disease, incomprehensible anomalies, and mysterious debris. Scientists continue to study the remains of the aliens' visit, and scavengers called "stalkers" prowl the Zones in secret, putting their lives on the line to steal artifacts for the black market. This short novel follows one such stalker, Redrick "Red" Schuhart, tracing the impact of the Zone on him and the other people in the adjacent semi-deserted town of Harmont.
I read this book in one sitting, as the premise is incredibly compelling. While the book would have been interesting enough had it focused entirely on the stalker's perilous adventures in the Zone, a great deal of attention is devoted to exploring how contact with the capital-U Unknowable changes the characters. The aliens themselves never make an …
Two decades have passed since the Visitation, when aliens visited Earth. The landscape has been left permanently altered. The so-called "Zones" remain quarantined, full of extraterrestrial disease, incomprehensible anomalies, and mysterious debris. Scientists continue to study the remains of the aliens' visit, and scavengers called "stalkers" prowl the Zones in secret, putting their lives on the line to steal artifacts for the black market. This short novel follows one such stalker, Redrick "Red" Schuhart, tracing the impact of the Zone on him and the other people in the adjacent semi-deserted town of Harmont.
I read this book in one sitting, as the premise is incredibly compelling. While the book would have been interesting enough had it focused entirely on the stalker's perilous adventures in the Zone, a great deal of attention is devoted to exploring how contact with the capital-U Unknowable changes the characters. The aliens themselves never make an appearance, and rather than a first contact scenario it's suggested that we humans are merely terrified and uncomprehending insects picking over the incidental litter of their brief visit (the titular "roadside picnic"). Despite their close proximity to the unknown, the humans largely continue to be driven by self-interest, lusting for money and fame. Despite this—if my interpretation of the ambiguous finale is correct—the book ends with the faintest glimmer of hope that humanity can move past their baser instincts.
Despite all the mystery and unanswered questions, this was an exciting and satisfying read. Although there are no direct connections, I think fans of Lovecraft's cosmic horror will especially appreciate this book.
First contact is made in the form of Zones and its far from idyllic or disastrous scenarios from the SF past. What we got is far more akin to a slap to the face... hell we can understand a slap. This is an indifferent gesture, if it can be called that and nobody knows for certain. This uncertainty and danger sucks in all that have anything to do with it and probably drives them mad, or at least make them pay for it. We see all this through the life of the Stalker Red and with him ask: Why, How, Did we do something wrong, Is it worth it, and never get an answer.
