Roadside Picnic: Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky

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In the afterword Arkady has a list of all the letters and petitions that were exchanged between various Russian committees trying to get approval. ”Eight years. Fourteen letters to the ‘big’ and ‘little’ Central Committees. Two hundred degrading corrections of the text. An incalculable amount of nervous energy wasted on trivialities...Yes, the authors prevailed; there’s no arguing with that. I also implore anyone who has read this book or is interested in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game to read about the difficulty the Strugatsky brothers faced in publishing this book under Soviet Russia - it's fascinating.

And here we see how an embittered, cruel person who has sunk to the very bottom asks absolute power not for money, not power, not even revenge for his enemies or health for his loved ones. And he asks “happiness for everyone for free, and let no one leave offended.” I love the bizarre alien artifacts described in this book. For example “empties” which are empty containers of some kind but you can only see the lid and the bottom, the container itself is not only invisible but seems to be made of nothingness. You can put your hands through the container in the space between the lid and the bottom as if there is nothing there but the lid and the bottom always maintain their relative positions and distance. They are extremely interesting artifacts but nobody knows what they are for, or what they are supposed to contain. There are quite a few mysterious objects like this in the book but the descriptions are quite elaborate so I will leave you to discover them for yourself. In addition to these objects, there are also weird effects of the Zones on people who were in the vicinity when the Visitation occurs. So I just watched Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” — the cult film loosely based on Strugatskys novel. Finally. And I have a bit of conflicted feelings about it. It’s an interesting film, quite similar in tone to “Solaris” (which I liked). But just the barest bones of connection to “Roadside Picnic” kept me at bay, making me realize how much I prefer the novel to the film. I think I would have liked it more had these been unrelated — and honestly, take out “stalker” and “zone” and the wish-granting artifact — and they may as well be separate works of art. So that’s really the only way I can think of them - almost separate works, of the “loosely inspired-by” variety.Roadside Picnic | Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | WWEnd. Worldswithoutend.com. Retrieved on 2011-03-17. Boris Strugatsky gave his blessing to Stalker: The Roleplaying Game by Burger Games, an acclaimed, in-depth adaptation of Roadside Picnic. In the interests of full disclosure I haven’t played it, but by all accounts, it does an excellent job of bringing the world of the book to life. There are numerous Zones players can explore, such as France and Japan, with each having unique environments, traps and artefacts. The sheer depth of lore and world building is another thing player’s love about Stalker, and the focus on players driving the story through their characters.

In 2003, the Finnish theater company Circus Maximus produced a stage version of Roadside Picnic, called Stalker. Authorship of the play was credited to the Strugatskys and to Mikko Viljanen and Mikko Kanninen. [17] This is the sort of book that you read and then immediately feel the need to lend it to someone you know so that they can experience and enjoy it themselves . . . I was truly astonished-by both the poignancy and the deceptive(?) simplicity of this relatively short novel' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Our main character used to go in on the side, offering unusual and hard to get prizes to independent corporations. Except, he is not doing this anymore. It's all legit work now. For the hopes of others.Because the concept is great (what if the infamous alien invasion finally came, only in the form of our foreign friends having a merry picnic and discarding their litter and scrap and waste there on the ground? And what if that waste, being alien, had some mysterious and incredible properties that men could study and put to use in turn?). And precisely because it's so great, it presents a tremendous amount of possibilities -both when it comes to the plotline and to the scientific aspect. But I feel that none of these possibilities were truly developed and explored. In fact, the whole story felt flat, uninteresting. The book is very short, and I went on even though I wasn't interested in what was happening, but I'm sure enough I kept on reading by inertia alone. The characters are no better. Edit: I also want to add that there is a fascinating history behind this book getting published. It took over 8 years for this to be published under Soviet Russia - not for any explicit political reasons, but purely because the straightforward speech of the characters and the not-so-Shakespearean writing was considered crass. The publishing industry at the time believed that characters drinking, swearing or threatening murder wouldn't be a good example to the "Soviet Youth that primarily consumed science fiction".