Roadside Picnic: 200 Word Reviews #29

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is like reading the cut content from a far better book.

The premise was ground breaking for the time: Aliens visit earth, but ignore us, and leave artefacts behind in The Zone. The plot follows Red, a stalker, who makes his living illegally venturing into The Zone and selling what he finds there. I know this sounds awesome, but most of the time he’s actually just drinking and all the interesting events happens in the very last few pages. Even then I couldn’t quite work out what the point was.

The book jumps around the timeline, and revisits Red at different stages of his life interspersed with different POVs to facilitate world-building. However, there is no central, driving plot that links them all together in a way that makes a meaningful story. Instead, it feels more like a container through which to present a new perspective of extra terrestrial encounters.

Roadside Picnic unique and ahead of its time, but I kept waiting for something intentional to happen, and it never really does. I recommend it for people interested in the legacy of Soviet Sci-Fi, but with a tolerance for great ideas disappointingly executed.