Roadside Picnic
[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]:
> 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. Some of these artefacts offer the promise of extraordinary powers. Unlike Tarkovsky's film, which concentrates on the hallucinatory, vacated landscape of the zones, the novels portray a society adapting to an inexplicable, terrifying event, an eruption of the unknown. Though written in 1971 and published in English in 1977, the novel was heavily bowdlerised by Soviet censors, and an authoritative text wasn't available in Russian until 2000. It's a book with an extraordinary atmosphere – and a demonstration of how science fiction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel.
Original Title: Пикник на обочине
[1]: http://guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
OK, I'm raving about this book because it was so much fun to read an old-fashioned Russian sci-fi story. I loved it. There's a deadpan quality about Russian fiction -- is it the translation? I don't think so. It's also the era. What I mean is, the writer doesn't cater to the reader. Something weird is mentioned in passing, and you, the reader, have to figure it out. You say, What? What now? What was that? And slowly, as you imagine what it might mean, all is revealed, later on in the narrative. Pish on "world-building." I mean the world is BUILT! And you, as an eavesdropper or somebody who just happened to pull back the curtain, get a glimpse, a stunning glimpse, of something alien. And then (of course it's Russian) there's the philosophizing. What does it all mean? What is human, anyway? I just eat that stuff up. The book is short, but the narrative is dense. I loved it.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.