Roadside Picnic

Tale of the Troika

by Boris Strugatsky, Борис Натанович Стругацкий, Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

245 pages

English language

Published Jan. 1, 1977 by Macmillan.

ISBN:: 978-0-02-615170-2
OCLC Number:: 2910972
Goodreads:: 3885738

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(3 reviews)

Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that took place in several locations around the Earth, simultaneously, 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 not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic.

2 editions

Len reviewed Piknik na robu ceste by Boris Strugatsky (Piknik)

A great read

No rating

This is a second Slovenian translation of Roadside Picnic and this time we got uncensored version of the book translated by the same translator. It has a very informative foreword which speaks about the fight that brothers Strugacky with the Soviet Union state bureaucracy to get this work published. What is really interested is that the censors in the end took out the bad language in the swear words. Roadside picnic is, according to the foreword, one of the few books that won the battle against censorship. The book is apolitical with slight anti-capitalist subtone so it is hard to imagine why it was not approved by the censors in the first place.

Regarding the book itself it is very gripping sci-fi thriller that questions what is humanity. It is almost at the top of my suggestion list.