In Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a brief, baffling visit by unseen aliens has left a half dozen places on Earth marred by deadly anomalies that defy the laws of physics. The Visitors also left behind their extraterrestrial equivalent of trash, inexplicable objects that can advance human technology or end human life. Access to these Visitation Zones is highly restricted. Roadside Picnic follows Redrick "Red" Schuhart, one of the "stalkers" who brave the Zones to smuggle out alien objects, facing dangers like "hell slime" and "witch's jelly" for "full empties" and "black sparks." Red rummages through alien garbage like ants and squirrels might scavenge the remains of a human family's roadside picnic. The book tracks Red's deteriorating fortunes over several years, punctuated by harrowing, surreal Zone inclusions and the horrifying tolls exacted on stalkers who survive such journeys.
Roadside Picnic was published serially in 1972 in a Soviet literary magazine. It was released in the United States in 1977. Thanks to Soviet delays and censorship, the original version endorsed by the Strugatsky brothers wasn't published in Russia until the 1990s. They were, however, able to write the screenplay for Stalker, a pioneering 1979 sci-fi film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and loosely based on Roadside Picnic, that sold 4.3 million tickets in the Soviet Union. In 2012, Chicago Review Press published a new translation of Roadside Picnic by Olena Bormashenko, with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin, as part of its Rediscovered Classics series. --Tobias Mutter
