Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, romanized: Piknik na obochine, IPA: [pʲɪkˈnʲik nɐ ɐˈbot͡ɕɪnʲe]) is a philosophical science fiction novel by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that was written in 1971 and published in 1972. It is their most popular and most widely translated novel outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky counted 55 publications of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries.
The story is published in English in a translation by Antonina W. Bouis. A preface to the first American edition was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Stanisław Lem wrote an afterword to the German edition of 1977.
Another English translation by Olena Bormashenko was published in 2012, with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky.
The book has been the source of many adaptations and other inspired works in a variety of media, including stage plays, video games, and television series. The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers. Later, in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, the first installment of a video game franchise taking inspiration from both the book and the film, was released as well.
The term stalker (сталкер) became a part of the Russian language and, according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, stalkers are people who trespass into the forbidden area known as the Zone and steal its valuable extraterrestrial artifacts, which they later sell. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden or uncharted territories; later on, urbexers and fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event, the Visitation, which occurred simultaneously in several locations around the Earth over a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local populations, who lived inside the relatively small areas, each a few square kilometers, of the six Visitation Zones. The Zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena that are not understood by humans and contain artifacts with inexplicable properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy that is proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic:
In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors have left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who have discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to the earthlings. The explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to or even noticed Earth's inhabitants during their visit, just as many humans do not notice or pay attention to insects and wildlife during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena that are left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, which are discarded and forgotten without any intentions to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again because for them it was a brief stop, for reasons unknown, on the way to their actual destination.
The novel is set in a post-Visitation world in which there are now six zones that are known on Earth to be full of unexplained phenomena with strange happenings having briefly occurred. They are assumed to have been Visitations by aliens. Governments and the United Nations, fearful of unforeseen consequences, try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones. A subculture of stalkers, scavengers who go into the zones to steal the artifacts for profit, has evolved around the zones. The novel is set in and around a specific zone in Harmont, a fictitious town in an unspecified English-speaking country, and follows the protagonist over the course of eight years.
The introduction is a live radio interview with Dr. Pilman, who is credited with the discovery that the six Visitation Zones' locations were not random. He explains it so: "Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point (is that) all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth–Deneb line. Deneb is the main star in Cygnus."
The story revolves around Redrick "Red" Schuhart, a brutal and experienced young stalker who regularly enters the Zone illegally at night in search of valuable artifacts for profit. Trying to clean up his act, he becomes employed as a lab assistant at the International Institute, which studies the Zone. To help the career of his boss, whom he considers a friend, he goes into the Zone with him on an official expedition to recover a unique artifact (a full "empty"), which later leads to his friend's death. That comes as a great shock when the news reaches Redrick, who is drunk in a bar, and he blames himself for his friend's fate. While Redrick is at the bar, a police force enters looking for stalkers. Redrick is forced to use a "shrieker" to make a hasty getaway. Red's girlfriend, Guta, is pregnant and decides to keep the baby no matter what. It is widely rumored that incursions into the Zone by stalkers carry high risk of mutations in their children even though no radiation or other mutagens have been detected in the area. They decide to marry.
Disillusioned, Redrick returns to stalking. In the course of his joint expedition into the Zone with a fellow stalker, named Burbridge (a.k.a. "The Vulture"), the latter steps into a substance known as "hell slime" (“witches jelly” in the older English translation), which slowly dissolves his leg bones. Amputation must be urgently performed to avoid Burbridge losing his legs entirely. Redrick pulls Burbridge out of the Zone, avoids the patrols, and drops him off at a surgeon. Later, Redrick is confronted by Burbridge's daughter, who gets angry with him for saving her father. Guta has given birth to a happy and intelligent daughter, who is fully normal but for having long, light full body hair and black eyes. They lovingly call her the "Monkey," Redrick meets with his clients in a posh hotel and sells them a fresh portion of the Zone artifacts, but what they are really after is "hell slime". It is hinted that they want it for military research. Redrick claims not to have it yet and leaves. Shortly afterward, Redrick is arrested but escapes. He then contacts his clients and tells them where he hid the "slime" sample that he had smuggled out. Redrick insists for all proceeds from the sale to be sent to Guta. He realizes that the "slime" will be used for some kind of weapon of mass destruction but decides that he has to provide for his family. He then gives himself up to the police.
Redrick's old friend Richard Noonan, a supply contractor with offices inside the institute, is revealed as a covert operative of an unnamed presumably-governmental, secret organization working to stop the contraband outflow of artifacts from the Zone. Believing that he is nearing the successful completion of his multi-year assignment, he is confronted and scolded by his boss, who reveals to him that the flow is stronger than ever, and he is tasked with finding who is responsible and how they operate. It is revealed that the stalkers are now organized under the cover of the "weekend picnics-for-tourists" business set up by Burbridge. They jokingly refer to the setup as "Sunday school". Noonan meets with Dr. Valentine Pilman for lunch, and they have an in-depth discussion of the Visitation and humanity in general in which the idea of "Visitation as a roadside picnic" is articulated. Redrick is home again and has served his time. Burbridge visits him regularly and tries to entice him into some secret project, but Redrick declines. Guta is depressed because their daughter has nearly lost her humanity and ability to speak and more and more resembles an actual monkey. Redrick's dead father is also present and came home from the cemetery inside the Zone, as other very slow-moving (and completely harmless) reanimated dead are now returning to their homes all around town. They are usually destroyed by the authorities as soon as they are discovered. Redrick, however, had forcibly managed to defend his father from being taken away.
Redrick goes into the Zone one last time to reach the wish-granting "Golden Sphere". He has a map that was given to him by Burbridge, whose son, Arthur, joins him on the expedition. Redrick knows one of them has to die in order to temporarily deactivate an invisible phenomenon known as the "meatgrinder" for the other to reach the Sphere, but he keeps that a secret from Arthur, whom he intends to sacrifice to it to make a wish to turn his daughter back to normal. After they get to the location and survive many obstacles, Arthur rushes towards the Sphere and shouts out selfless wishes for a better world, only to be savagely dispatched by the meatgrinder. With the Sphere in front of him, an exhausted Redrick looks back in confusion and bitterness on his whole life of desperate survival in a harsh world, his servitude, and his lack of free will, and he finds that he cannot articulate what he actually wants from the Sphere. After much unaccustomed introspection, Red at first leaves it to the Sphere to look into his untainted soul "to figure out" his wish because "it can't be bad" and effectively makes his wish that there is something left in him that would wish for good. In irony, he winds up obsessing in the same way the boy had. "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE OF CHARGE, AND MAY NO ONE BE LEFT BEHIND!"
The story was written by the Strugatsky brothers in 1971. The first outlines were written January 18–27 in Leningrad, and the final version was completed between October 28 and November 3 in Komarovo. It was first published in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972, issues 7–10. Parts of it (Section 1) were published in Volume 25 of the Library of Modern Science Fiction in 1973. A Russian-language version endorsed by the Strugatsky brothers as the original was published in the 1970s.
By 1998, 38 editions of the novel had been published in 20 countries. The novel was first translated into English by Antonina W. Bouis. The preface to the first American edition of the novel (Macmillan, New York, 1977) was written by Theodore Sturgeon.
In 2012, the novel was re-released in English. It was re-translated but also based on a version that was restored by Boris Strugatsky to the original state before the Soviet censors had made their alterations.