Roadside Picnic
Arkady Strugatsky
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems. First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.
Publication Year: 2000
The afterword helped give context to some of the cultural stuff behind the scenes, and about the history of publication of this within the Soviet scene. A bit on the duller side compared to the novel proper, but still interesting information.
0So, chapter three focuses on a different character, one we meet earlier on in the story. We learn more about him, the pressure he's facing, and watch him engage in a deeply philosophical debate about the aliens and their reasoning with a man who's name is very close to my partner's hedgehog's name (in fact, I keep misreading that guy's name as the hedgehog's name, leading to a delightful mental image of a bespectacled hedgehog drinking cognac and debating aliens). But the last roughly quarter of the chapter got surprisingly depressing surprisingly quickly.
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