Customer Reviews

Roadside Picnic (SF Collector's Edition)

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Strugatsky brothers wrote fiction with a slant readers won't find in any western works in the genre. Roadside Picnic is one of the most imaginative. A brief visitation to our planet from some unknown place by unknown beings for reasons incomprehensible. Six locations on the face of the globe, positioned as though someone fired a pistol at it from space as it turned, are permanently changed, studied and fought over by humans. The storyline involves a 'stalker', a young man who was a child in one of the areas at the time of the visitation, who then spends the remainder of his life sneaking past guards and barriers risking his life in bizarre expeditions to remove and blackmarket artifacts. His trails into the hometown of his birth are marked by piles of clothing of other less-fortunate stalkers, guideposts of danger spots. The activities then lead him into prison sentences and an alienation from the bulk of humanity that only the Strugatsky brothers might visualize.

If you love good science fiction you'll love this book. If you don't love science fiction you'll still love it. You'll probably also form a desire to read their other contributions. If so, you are in for a difficult pursuit. These tomes are rapidly becoming obsure.

It was the first book of A.& B.Strugatsky I've read when I was 16. After that I have re-read it 5 or 6 times... Brilliant thing about the meaning of life, about the place of human being, about happiness and despair. We, Russians, use to call this style "social phantasy", not SF. You can understand this, if you understand in what country this book was written. Developing the theme of postcommunist society, authors have created their own world, and you can find a lot of analogies and heroes that are common for some other books of them. Yes, Picnic is one of the best, but don't stop - there are other exciting works...

***This comment may contain Spoilers***

"Picnic na obochine" aka "Roadside Picnic written by the most popular among the Soviet readers of many generations writers in the genre of Science Fiction, brothers Arkadiy and Boris Strugatsky is much more than science fiction. It can be viewed as dark satire and anti-utopia as well. What is important, it is a very well written book which I've read many times and will read again.

The alliens have briefly visited Earth (perhaps for an emegency stop or for a picnic as the title suggests) and left behind many strange and unusual items, some of them funny and useful, some - dangerous and even deadly. These items became so popular on a black market that many people were ready to pay a lot of money or to risque their lives for them. The most desirable and mysterious of all was "Golden Sphere" that could grant any wish but nobody ever was able to reach it. Among stalkers, the persons possessing knoweledge of the area and its dangers, there was Roderick (Red) Schuhart, the main character of the book, He was not a saint; he was a human being with a lot of weaknesses. Red possessed inhuman intuition and luck that had helped him to survive the multiple trips to the Zone. But the Zone caught up with him in the end, and he was paying the ultimate price watching how his only child who was born as a beautiful and joyful girl was turning into the strange and mute animal. That was why Red decided to make the last trip to the Zone and find the legendary Golden Sphere. Red knew he could not go alone because just when you thought that you reached the Sphere there was an ultimate trap that could only be fed by a human being. Such great and desperate was Red's desire to get his daughter back that he took with him an innocent young man, teenager really, perfectly knowing that the man will never return from the Zone. Red found out that after he finally reached the Sphere, he did not know what and how to ask; his only hope was that the magic tool would reach inside his soul and find that his soul was still alive and bleeding from pain and begging for his daughter and for forgiveness.

Andrei Tarkovsky took the final chapter of the book and used the idea of the last trip for the film "Stalker" He himself along with the Strugatsky Brothers had rewritten the screenplay many times until he was satisfied with it. As much as I respect Tarkovsky and admire his films, I am not a fan of "Stalker" and I'd prefer if he had adapted the final chapter the way Strugatsky Brothers wrote it. I found the last chapter of the book much more interesting, deeper, and tragic than all the debates among the characters and monologues of the Stalker and his wife in the film.

SF in English has two problems... 1) it's become branded and commercialised e.g. Star Trek pulp novels and 2) it doesn't know enough about SF in other languages. Reading "Roadside Picnic" is a nice antidote to both. SF is meant to be Science and Fiction, not Pulp and Trash.

As a novel it isn't perfect. I reckon it only really gets going about 3/4 of the way through, but having said that, the first 3/4 ARE readable. Like Lem's "Solaris" it tackles questions about ETs that corporate SF doesn't deal with, like "Can we communicate with aliens?" & "Can we even understand them?". The aliens in Roadside Picnic aren't two dimensional Klingons or Vulcans, but genuinely alien.

Some of the dialogue could do with tidying up too (translator's fault?), but unlike the majority of junk that masquerades as classic Science Fiction in English, it stands up as literature and a good novel in its own right. Theodore Sturgeon's excellent foreword points this out better than I can.

One more thing... you might be surprised to find out that Russian characters are actually thin on the ground in this novel. They seem to be in the minority - apart from Kirill. There are no obvious "Soviet vibes" from it either, political or otherwise.

There are several used book sellers here selling a copy of this book for far, far too much. The 2007 SF Masterworks version is currently selling on Amazon.co.uk for about 3 pounds, an order of magnitude less than these scoundrels are selling it for. If you want a copy of this book and don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it, make sure to get this new edition straight from Amazon.co.uk. (Fantastic book!)

At the moments like this I feel privileged to be a native Russian speaker. Brothers Strugatsky would have been perhaps not less famous than Heinlein, Clark, and Orson Card, if not for the language and cultural barrier that devided the former USSR from the rest of the world. This is a brilliant book about humanity and being humane. Not a very joyful reading cause it explores deep social issues. I wouldn't trace this fascianting allegorical society to the Soviet Union of then, but all and all the general atmosphere of hopelessness and despair is very typical for the last "great empire". This book is an absolute must to everyone who takes pride in loving Sci-Fi!

I read on IMDB that a loose adaptation of Roadside Picnic is soon to come out. I know not if it is going to be a Hollywood abomination or a faithful film. I strongly doubt the latter, because then the film would be around one hour long and very very grim.

And this is how this short novel is best described. It is short, yes, but stays long in the memory. It is like an athlete at his prime: not a grammar of fat, all muscles. I wish Arkadi and Boris would start editing modern science fiction, and unbloat the thousands of pages forced to us by mediocre, average or even masters of today SF.

The novel is also grim. Stark. Dour. Stern. Serious. Humourless. Even the satire in it is grim, stark, dour, stern, serious, humourless. There is a scene in Roadside Picnic including the hero's daughter and father that if it fails to chill you, then you are probably dead.

As with all SF masterpieces, ideas abound in every page of Roadside Picnic. Compressed in 150 pages, are enough ideas that would carry lesser writers through a 40 year career. But enough with the praise. 5 stars, and don't forget to get it before Hollywood does.

This is the best sci-fi novel I've ever read. I read sci-fi for twenty years before a Russian friend turned me on to this book. It stirred up thoughts and emotions within me that I've never before experienced. The book is so powerful that it was banned in the Soviet Union, yet fans would manually retype the manuscripts for distribution along a chain of Strugatsky fans.

All I can say is this book belongs in the library of anyone who considers him or herself a fan of literature.

-- JJ Timmins

I can't say I've ever read a novel or short novel more than once...this is another topic altogether I suppose. However, I've started reading this one again, and how fast I've gone through it!

If you like Stanislav Lem, read this. If you aren't a "Science Fiction reader", read this. It's not good to over-rate any piece of art, for fear that you'll unecessarily raise expectations, but I must recommend this story to anyone interested in pure speculative fiction, Russian or otherwise.

(note: I did see the movie, and it's great...but it's an entirely different and personalised interpretation of the story. Tarkovsky did the same with Solaris by Lem.)

(note2: some editions of this come "bundled" with Tale of the Troika, which I couldn't finish because I found it simply too absurd for my tastes...a poor choice on behalf of the publishers, in my opinion.)

One of the best pieces of sci-fi fiction in the last few decades, "Roadside Picnic" tells the story of a Stalker, one of the few who dare to enter a zone of suspended disbelief that is the remnant of a possible alien visitation. Stalkers venture into the deadly realm for artifacts, which are sometimes useful, sometimes enigmatic, sometimes life-threatening, in order to survive in the oppressive, broken social climate surrounding the zone.

Anybody who's ever played the video-game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" will recognise the very concise plot; those who've read "Nova Swing" by M. J. Harrison will have also come across one of the many pieces of fiction inspired by this short novel.

The writing is terse and superbly descriptive, shifting from a first-person narritive to third partway through. The change is expertly handled by the Strugatsky brothers, who are masters at the hard under-stated personalities that frequent Soviet fiction - think the protagonist from "Solaris", if you've read it, and you'll know what I mean.

Some have critisised the novel for being "too much sociology and not enough sci-fi", that is to say, not what they were expecting. However if you get exactly what you expected in a novel, you probably just read pulp or a 1960s comic book. "Roadside Picnic" is a beautifully written, inspiring read, with strong, desperate characters and a thrilling premise.

The only downside is that it is perhaps too short: the potential for other aspects of the story to be played out - like the original of the zones, further applications of artifacts, scientific or unanticipated, or the continued stories of some of the characters - are put aside in favour of a delicious form of mystery that will keep you reading right up until the fantastic thought-provoking denoument.

Unmissable.