Roadside Picnic

245 pages

English language

Published Jan. 1, 1977 by Macmillan.

ISBN:: 978-0-02-615170-2
OCLC Number:: 2910972
Goodreads:: 3885738

(2 reviews)

Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that took place in several locations around the Earth, simultaneously, over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic.

2 editions

Tak! reviewed Roadside Picnic by Boris Strugatsky

Roadside Picnic

3 stars

Roadside Picnic reads like a love letter to functional alcoholism.

The basic premise is that there were a series of isolated visitations to earth by unknown aliens, who subsequently fucked off and never came back. However, the places where they visited are now strewn with various items and phenomena that behave inexplicably to modern science, in ways that are often extremely dangerous to humans.

In addition to scientists coming to study the visitation zones, this also results in a black market for harvested technology, with people ("stalkers") sneaking in to exfiltrate things at great personal risk.

It's clear that this is if nothing else a spiritual predecessor to Annihilation. Everything is focused around the weird and often brutally inscrutable, with no explanation required or given. It definitely shows its age (and possibly cultural origin), especially in terms of attitudes about gender roles.

The translation was very good imo. I was …

Roadside Picnic reads like a love letter to functional alcoholism.

The basic premise is that there were a series of isolated visitations to earth by unknown aliens, who subsequently fucked off and never came back. However, the places where they visited are now strewn with various items and phenomena that behave inexplicably to modern science, in ways that are often extremely dangerous to humans.

In addition to scientists coming to study the visitation zones, this also results in a black market for harvested technology, with people ("stalkers") sneaking in to exfiltrate things at great personal risk.

It's clear that this is if nothing else a spiritual predecessor to Annihilation. Everything is focused around the weird and often brutally inscrutable, with no explanation required or given. It definitely shows its age (and possibly cultural origin), especially in terms of attitudes about gender roles.

The translation was very good imo. I was a little apprehensive after having read a terrible translation of Metro 2033, but no complaints on that front.

Len reviewed Piknik na robu ceste by Boris Strugatsky (Piknik)

A great read

No rating

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.

Subjects

Science fiction