Roadside Picnic
Chicago Review Press · Paperback · May 1, 2012
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.
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- Who it’s for
- Hard-edged science fiction with enough strangeness to keep the pages moving.
- Genres
- Alien Contact, Dystopian, The Classics
- Published
- Chicago Review Press, May 1, 2012
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
Continue reading
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.
Strange Terrain
Hard-edged science fiction with enough strangeness to keep the pages moving.
Come here for
- Hard-sf grit with a literary aftertaste
- A classic that still feels a little off-kilter
Expect
- Sparse, tense atmosphere
- Cultural cachet without the homework
Where it sits
| Dystopian | 65% |
|---|---|
| Alien Contact | 57% |
| The Classics | 31% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Sci-Fi
- Sci-Fi Adventure
- Hard Sci-Fi
- Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Show all 5 publisher categories
- Cultural Heritage Fiction
- Authors
- Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko
- Publisher
- Chicago Review Press
- Published
- May 1, 2012
- Format
- Paperback
- Reading lane
- Sci-Fi