Paperback, 145 pages
English language
Published Aug. 24, 2000 by Gollancz.
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.
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.
An enjoyable read, kinda nihilistic book but I'd say it's a positive nihilism that I can get behind. Bunch of weird sci-fi ideas that were really intriguing and it differs a lot from the movie (Stalker) and the games (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) which was good even though the three are a real triangle of greatness. Recommend for those who like aliens, alcoholics, body horror, and futility.
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.
