Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky · Boris Strugatsky · Olena Bormashenko

May 2012 · Chicago Review Press

About this ebook

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a &“full empty,&” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he'll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years. This authoritative new translation corrects many errors and omissions and has been supplemented with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and a new afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the strange history of the novel's publication in Russia.

Ratings and reviews

The quality of the writing is wildly variable, which may be due to the translation. The world-building is excellent, and the sections of plot that take place within the Zone are imaginative and terrifying. This is the novel at its best. I found most of the characters to be extremely unlikable. It's difficult to root for anyone. Additionally, women have no place in this story other than as sexual objects or as tools for men to use. Perhaps this is a product of the era in which it was written. The novel spends much of its length on side plots or characters that are both uninteresting and inconsequential to the overall narrative. The plot ends rather abruptly and without any real climax, but I find myself appreciating the ending more the longer I mull on it. I do not regret reading it, but I will probably not read it again.

Great beginning, great ending, but mediocre middle. I expected more adventures into the Zone, but from my recollection there were only 3 or 4. The book slows down a lot to highlight Redrick's tortured soul and while that is something worth exploring, it gets in the way of thrills. Probably just isn't my cup of tea...

Roadside Picnic has a large, well deserved, cult following. The Strugatsky Brothers' fantastic imaginations are a rare find, and I've not read many stories with the same level of creativity. A lot of objects and questions go intentionally unexplained; the reader's imagination is part of why the story works so well. At other times more detail would have been helpful, but that's not a major concern. This is Soviet sci-fi at its best.

About the author

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are the most famous and popular Russian writers of science fiction, and the authors of over 25 novels and novellas. Their books have been widely translated and have been made into a number of films. Arkady Strugatsky died in 1991. Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and other science-fiction classics.