Piknik na robu ceste

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.

Roadside Picnic is one of the most unique books of science fiction I have read. A first contact story where we don’t get whats going on, things happen too quickly, and the aliens leave without further to do, and the world keeps spinning.

The only trace of their Visit is some areas known as The Zones, where strange phenomena and dangerous traps can ben found at every corner, as well as strange objects and alien technology beyond human understanding, that lies there for whoever is willing to take it.

Those who venture inside the Zone to scavenge those goods are known as stalkers. The artifacts they find they then sell to whoever is willing to pay, making it a lucrative, if dangerous job. Of course, the government is trying to investigate and find a use for those objects as well, so being a stalker is very much illegal.

In this story we follow Red, a stalker who is trying to have a normal life, but he finds himself returning to the Zone time after time. He is just a random guy who is pretty good at his job, and every time he keeps telling himself it will be the last.

Most of the characters are pretty much regular people trying to adapt to this new world, there’s barely any geniuses or amazing discoveries done thanks to the new alien technology, and if there is, it’s clear it’s being used for very simple purposes, like using a rocket engine to start a fire.

At the time, and still today, science fiction is seen from the lenses of formidable heroes, brilliant scientists and engineers. In this book, most people are normal humans, and talk like a normal human (althought I think some of it is lost in translation), and most of the physics and technology in the novel has nicknames and slang that is not really scientific, simply based on what an artifact does or looks like, such as empties, bugtraps and shriekers.

What I liked the most about this story is its exploration on how humans would react to this, as a whole. Nobody is trying to contact the aliens or to figure everything out, we don’t even get to know how they looked, or find any kind of message. The principles behind the Zones are a complete mystery to humankind. The technology is far too advanced, and the dangers are far too high for any efforts to bring any significant results.

The implications of it all are big, the insight of some of the characters about our place in the universe. One of my favorite bits was a conversation that shares lots of thoughts and ideas about the reason for the visit, how it affects society as a whole, and despite it all, Humanity keeps moving forward and adapts to this new reality as the status quo.

A fantastic read that only takes a few hours to read and really brings a very interesting outlook to life and our place in this universe. I highly recommend this one!

I enjoyed this a lot. It's surprising the level of world building that's achieved here given the length. The chapters are long and few, and each one gives you something different to take away about the Zone, how it affects regular people, and how some have learned to take advantage of it.

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.

From the back:

"Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a "full empty," something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he'll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years. This authoritative new translation corrects many errors and omissions and has been supplemented with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and a new afterword by Boris Strugatsky explaining the strange history of the novel's publication in Russia."

First sentence: "I suppose that your first important discovery, Dr. Pillman, was the celebrated Pillman radiant?"

Last sentence: "To hell with it all, I just can't think of a thing other than those words of his-HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!"

Recently, I've been reading more science fiction. I don't know how accurate that statement is because, really, I've just been reading a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin and John Wyndham. Both authors approach science fiction in a way that appeals more to me. They focus less on the flashy technology and the science but more on the daily and surprisingly human interactions between foreign entities. Discovering new cultures or experiencing what-if scenarios of how humans would react to certain events is what I look for in science fiction.

For some reason, I was a little dubious about Roadside Picnic. A friend of mine recommended this to me and it seemed like we were on the same page when it came to science fiction. I was a little worried when I learned that one of their favourite games, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was based on this book. I'm not someone really interested in shooters or high-risk treasure hunts. I decided to give it a shot anyway. When I saw that Le Guin had written the foreword to Roadside Picnic, I was delighted. If my friend with good taste and my favourite science fiction author approved of it, it must be good, right?

I was not disappointed.

First, let me gush about Le Guin's foreword for a second. Le Guin mentions the context that this novel was written in. Censorship was rampant during this time in the Soviet Union. In the afterword, Boris Strugatsky recounts many of the violations Roadside Picnic managed to accumulate, ranging from acts of violence, crude language, and immoral behaviour. Le Guin so succinctly observes that science fiction (in Russia) is a way to write from freedom from Party ideology. More concisely, "They wrote as free men write."

The universe of Roadside Picnic is soaked with subtle details of the daily lives of stalkers and the collateral damage they leave behind. The concept of the novel is somewhat simple: aliens visited Earth and humans go into those locations to grab whatever the aliens left behind for research, profit, or both. However, it takes that and creates compelling stories from it.

While Roadside Picnic explores narratives from several characters, the character in the spotlight the most is Rederick Schuhart or as he is more known by, Red. By far, he is the most interesting character out of all them. When the point of view shifted to other characters, I was a bit bored (bar the one philosophical conversation that I found extremely intriguing). However, the Strugatsky brothers accomplished something in that although I was bored, the content was still important in contributing to the story.

This book, overall, was just a lot of fun. It is a quick read and although it took me a week to get through it, I found myself flipping pages frantically. I did not want to put it down (it doesn't help that when I read, I usually read on the commute and I can't stay on a train forever).

An interesting thing that I really liked about this novel was just how Russian it is. When I think dystopian, I think of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I remember reading a review of Roadside Picnic that compares the two. They are entirely but they both are extremely Russian. I don't know what it is, but Russian authors have such a distinct voice that I am completely enamoured with. From Nabokav to Bulgakov to Dostoyevsky... I think I can now add the Strugatsky brothers to my list of Russian authors that I admire.