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Roadside Picnic
by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
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Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explanation. No one saw the visitors. Their presence caused disease and blindness in the areas where they landed. Now, in the six "Zones", the laws of physics (and, seemingly, of reality) are disturbed by anomalies, and littered with inexplicable, deadly wreckage. Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale.…
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"Yes, Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. It is what Tarkovsky’s great and weird film Stalker is based on. The story, like a lot of Soviet science fiction, is set safely outside the Soviet Union in a capitalist wasteland, where interesting things can happen that you can talk about! Some aliens that are incredibly powerful arrive briefly on earth and then bugger off again leaving some ambiguous and very frightening objects behind them, which the book says are rather like the wrappings and empty bottles left at the side of the road after people have stopped their car for a picnic and gone on again. Around these mysterious objects, which may or may not have the power to grant wishes, a whole desperate shanty town of prospectors and chancers has grown up. The thing about Soviet science fiction is that it was actually far freer than Soviet literary fiction to do interesting, bold, satirical, avant-garde things. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful."