Roadside Picnic

Author: Arkady Strugatsky

During the Cold War, little of the science fiction being written in the Soviet Union managed to reach the West. The one exception was the work of the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who wrote getting on for 20 novels between the late 1950 and the late 1980s. Most, though by no means all of these were translated into English, the most prominent of which were Hard to be a God, The Final Circle of Paradise, Snail on the Slope and especially Roadside Picnic.This is the story of a forbidden region in a remote part of the Soviet Union where aliens had briefly landed. What they left behind was probably no more than the garbage we might leave behind after a roadside picnic, but to Earth it represents a glimpse of an impossibly advanced technology. Which is enough to prompt some people to brave both the Soviet guards and the dangers of the alien technology to investigate the Zone.Why it's on the listRoadside Picnic proved to be an incredibly influential work, largely because of the film version, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky (with a screenplay by the Strugatsky brothers), which has influenced works as varied as M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy and Jeff Vandermeer's Area X trilogy.

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Although the Strugatsky brothers wrote some optimistic, utopian fiction early in their career, most of their best work has a much darker feel to it. Hard to be a God takes observers from a utopian Earth to a medieval world where they find themselves unable to act against the rise of a fascist dictatorship and a militant religion. In The Final Circle of Paradise an investigator arrives in a seaside resort where there have been a series of unexplained deaths. He finds a city totally given over to decadence, but as he explores further he finds that at the root of it all is an electronic component known as a Slug that creates an utterly addictive virtual reality that is more intense than normal reality.