Roadside Picnic

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 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, seemingly supernatural properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation 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.[2]

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 those who find them.

This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to, or even noticed, the human inhabitants of the planet during their visit, just as humans do not notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten, without any preconceived plan 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 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.[3] Roadside Picnic was refused publication in book form in the Soviet Union for eight years due to government censorship and numerous delays. The heavily censored versions published between 1980 and 1990 significantly departed from the original version.[4] 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.[5] 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.

• The novel was nominated for a John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of 1978 and won second place.[6]
• In 1978, the Strugatskys were accepted as honorary members of the Mark Twain Society for their "outstanding contribution to world science fiction literature."[7]
• A 1979, Scandinavian congress on science fiction literature awarded the Swedish translation the Jules Verne prize for best novel of the year published in Swedish.[3]
• In 1981, at the sixth Festival du Science Fiction in Metz, France the novel won the award for best foreign book of the year.[8]

• A 1977 Czechoslovak TV miniseries Návštěva z Vesmíru (Visit from Space). After its TV premiere, all copies were destroyed by censors.[9]
• A 1979 science fiction film, Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, with a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, is loosely based on the novel.
• While not a direct adaptation, the video game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is heavily influenced by Roadside Picnic. The first game in the series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, references many important plot points from the book, such as the wish granter and the unknown force blocking the path to the center of the zone. It also contains elements such as anomalies and artifacts that are similar to those described in the book, but that are created by a supernatural ecological disaster, not by alien visitors.
• The book is referenced in the post-apocalyptic video game Metro 2033. A character shuffles through a shelf of books in a ruined library and finds Roadside Picnic, he states that it is "something familiar". Metro 2033 was created by individuals who had worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. before founding their own video game development company. The game was based on a novel of the same name which also took influence from Roadside Picnic.
• The 1992 video game Star Control II references alien visitations with mysterious effects and the mosquito mange regarding the disappearance of the Androsynth.[10]
• In 2003, the Finnish theater company Circus Maximus produced a stage version of Roadside Picnic, called Stalker. Authorship of the play was credited to the Strugatskys and to Mikko Viljanen and Mikko Kanninen.[11]
• A tabletop role-playing game in 2012 titled Stalker was developed by Ville Vuorela of Burger Games.[12]
• M. John Harrison's novel Nova Swing (2007), which features a location called the 'Event Zone' where reality is skewed in various ways, can be seen to be influenced by Roadside Picnic.[13]
• A Finnish low-budget indie film Vyöhyke (Zone), directed by Esa Luttinen, was released in 2012. The film is set in a Finnish visitation zone, and refers to material in the novel as well as the Tarkovsky film.[14][15]
• British progressive rock band Guapo's 2013 album History of the Visitation, is based on the novel.[16]
• In 2016, the US TV channel WGN America ordered a pilot for a TV adaptation, starring Matthew Goode and directed by Alan Taylor, but did not proceed to a series order.[17]
• The 2016 video game The Final Station is partly based on the book, in which an alien "Visitation" occurred across several countries in the game. The Visitation devastated human society but also left some advanced technology to humanity.[18]
• The documentary HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis discusses the book and its role in questioning the realism of Soviet society.
• Japanese writer Iori Miyazawa's 2017 Otherside Picnic is a novel, manga and anime series in which two girls explore the "Otherside", a world of urban legend populated by ghosts of folklore.[19]
• Annihilation, a 2018 science fiction psychological horror film, written and directed by Alex Garland, though based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, for some critics betrays obvious similarities with the Roadside Picnic and Stalker.[20][21][22][23]
• A skirmish wargame published in 2020 titled Zona Alfa featuring "skirmish rules for scavenging, exploring, and surviving in a near-future, post-apocalyptic Eastern European setting" in which players can "take on the role of bandits, mercenaries, and military units fighting over the blasted Exclusion Zone and its abandoned artefacts" was developed by Patrick Todoroff for Osprey Publishing.[24]

• Roadside Picnic, full English text (Antonina W. Bouis translation), archive at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
• Roadside Picnic, parallel text in Russian and English
• Review of the Roadside Picnic on the Infinity Plus website
• The SF Site Featured Review: Roadside Picnic
• Stanisław Lem about Roadside Picnic