Roadside Picnic
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| Author | Arkady and Boris Strugatsky |
|---|---|
| Original title | Пикник на обочине |
| Translator | Antonina W. Bouis |
| Cover artist | Richard M. Powers |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Macmillan |
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Publication date
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1972 |
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Published in English
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1977 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 2910972 |
Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine, IPA: [pʲɪkˈnʲik nɐ ɐˈbotɕɪnʲe]) is a short science fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in 1971. By 1998, 38 editions of the novel were published in 20 countries. The novel was first translated to English by Antonina W. Bouis. The preface to the first American edition of the novel (MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc, New York, 1977) was written by Theodore Sturgeon. The film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers.
Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event (called the Visitation) that simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth for a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local population who lived inside the relatively small (a few square kilometers) area of each of the six Visitation Zones. Such zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. The name of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman who compares the extraterrestrial event to a picnic:
A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.
In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.
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