“The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.”

Roadside Picnic was a bucket list read for a long time thanks to Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece film STALKER. I had heard this book was very different from that film, so I admit I had some apprehension that it would detract from my enjoyment of either. I picked it up randomly and found myself hard to stop. This is an instant favorite of mine and is easily a masterpiece 10/10. Here's why I think so and why I believe such a small book has had such a large impact.

Roadside Picnic encapsulates a unique feeling of horror and dread. It is not quite cosmic horror, but it evokes the same nihilistic fears of emptiness and insignificance. What makes it different? In cosmic or eldritch horror, the horrors are not some malevolent all powerful being, they are our very existence and laws of reality. This is a frightening meditation on human progress and meaning that is even more chilling when you remember that this was written years before the abhorrent Chernobyl disaster. Roadside Picnic gives us a perfectly realized world wrecked with catastrophe in the smallest of places. Rural towns in the middle of who knows where populated by sparse and simple people suddenly find themselves in a zone of unthinkable terror. It is realized clinically as well as emotionally. The Strugatskys strike a careful balance between focusing on the government and the citizens, showing how such an event affects something as large and unstoppable as the military industrial complex and as small and fragile as the nuclear family.

Roadside Picnic drops us in media res in a world where Zones have been created in 6 random locations. No rhyme or reason. Aliens stopped briefly and without a care, as if to just take a break on the side of the cosmic road, and left. What they left behind is to them probably nothing more than junk and dirt. To us, it is wholly unnatural. Strange devices and energy that do unspeakable things to our bodies and our environment. People called "stalkers" brave the dangerous trek into the Zone to find whatever scraps they can to make a quick buck. All the while, agencies are fascinated by the potential weaponization of these substances.

We primarily follow Schuhart, a stalker who is trying to live an honest life. Feeling alienated and disenfranchised after being caught and swearing a clean life, he finds himself slipping back into stalking despite having a clean job legally exploring the Zone. He faces grave consequences for this, both from the law and from his personal life. His story is not the only one though. In one section, we take a fantastic break and pull back to show the larger scale of this conflict. The story feels more like an interesting debate between two intellectuals rather than a narrative for this time, but I mean that in the best way. It truly made me think, something not many books nowadays do. That sounds shallow, but that's the purest way I can describe it.

“In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts."

This section climaxes with a return to the smaller and more intimate story in such a deeply unsettling way that I had to put the book down and take a break. The creeping dread as the subjects realize just how impossibly insidious this seemingly distant threat truly is rattles the core of the reader, just as it does to the characters. The mysterious unknown seeps into humanity in all senses. It contaminates us from the inside and soils the bonds we have with even our own blood, past and future. It evokes Arthur C. Clarke's chilling masterpiece CHILDHOOD'S END, which I think is actually intentional, as there is a passing mention of an unknown book with a similar event happening.

"There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge...Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense.”

The influence of this book can be felt wide across a multitude of mediums. From films like STALKER, books like ANNIHILATION and METRO 2033, to video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or FALLOUT, and even to anime like MADE IN ABYSS, but there is nothing like it. Roadside Picnic stands as a staggeringly solid monolith that beckons the reader to dive headfirst into heady thoughts of despair and dread, to question if progress is all good and if the endless pursuit of material or knowledge leads to any satisfaction or if it eats away at our spiritual being. It is easily the most fascinating musing on an "alien invasion" I ever experienced, and there is something absolutely terrifying about how impartial and blunt it is depicted here. There is a brutal reality to it all, an anxious feeling of systems falling apart that is so distinctly Russian yet can be felt by anyone, especially in our modern times. If you were also scared away from reading this book due to an infatuation with its adaptations or influences, you owe it to yourself to experience this text, because I can guarantee that nothing you previously experienced no matter how related it is to it will come close to the original feeling. This is my wish.


“HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”