Name: Roadside Picnic
ISBN: 9780671458423

Roadside Picnic

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. 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

What Hacker News says

dv35zSep 2026

I just read

(1) Roadside Picnic (the book which "Stalker" game is based from).

This was a page-turner! Fascinated by the science artifacts & effects (like gravitational glitches, frozen black sparks, etc)

(2) "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clarke (who wrote 2001 Space Odyssey)

The sheer time scale of the story is impressive, and the technology is so interesting - especially for 1950s! There are some interesting time effects too (like an unborn child telepathically channeling information to a conversation in the past!)

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branonSep 2026

Recently I have begun reading more than one book at a time, which I have never done before.

I'm not stellar at this yet, trying to juggle three turns into progressing two fairly quickly with the third much slower...

Clive Barker, Books of Blood - Currently in volume three. I've always found horror to require, like fantasy, a concentrated effort on my part as a reader to sustain suspension of disbelief. But these are great fun even if that's difficult sometimes.

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We - With sci-fi for whatever reason I do not suffer from the suspension-of-disbelief problem, the worldbuilding is much easier to immerse myself in. (Before this I was reading Roadside Picnic which was extremely good)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago - The slow one, still very interesting, nonfiction is uncommon for me

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branonSep 2026

I also finished Roadside Picnic recently and was enthralled, easily the best sci-fi I have read this year, I can see why it's spawned so many derivative works.

The Tarkovsky film wasn't bad either. I played a little bit of the game but increasingly I find immersion in video games difficult.

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huseyinkelesAug 2026

Related to the #4, I recommend the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky.

“What if we finally got visited by aliens but the most important event in or history was simply an intergalactic roadside picnic for the aliens?

They don’t even bother with us ants. They just pull over have some fun for a couple of hours and leave a mess behind…”

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atombenderJun 2026

Stalker has an interesting history, because Tarkovsky did shoot the Strugatskys' own screenplay first.

But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.

Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.

I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.

In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.

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bookofjoeMay 2026

For a sec there I thought it said "Roadside Picnic"

You could do worse than spend some time with this fantastic 1972 novel (forward by Ursula K. Le Guin):

https://content.cosmos.art/media/pages/library/roadside-picn...

Bonus: this version has an afterward by author Boris Strugatsky which is quite entertaining.

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