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Roadside Picnic cover art

Roadside Picnic

Written by: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky, Olena Bormashenko - translator
Narrated by: Robert Forster
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Publisher's Summary

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.

©1972 Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (P)2012 Random House

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What listeners say about Roadside Picnic

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
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amazing!

good narrator, great story

I'm listening to this while playing stalker-like games and it helps with the vibe. would recommend.

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  • Overall
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Roadside Picnic

Overall very interesting and engaging, really keeps you wondering at times and invested in the story and its characters. narration is overall well done but maybe one or two other voices would have really benefitted the experience. Narrator is good but feels a little flat at times.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story, ending give me a huge punch!

Watched Andrei Tarcokvski ‘ Stalker twice, and decide to check out the book. The movie was great, and did not just retold the story, so it did not steal the thunder of the book. The ending gives me a big punch! I love sci-fi and did not expect a Soviet era sci-fi could pack such a big punch. The performance is amazing. 2 minutes into the audio I already figured who the voice was. His voice added the extra suspense and yugen feeling.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Unique

Science and technology are not always the solution to our problems. There is no golden orb that grants wishes. Why do we still seek it?

The narrator was really good and gave the essence of the stalker character. The accent was wrong.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Perfect from start to finish

Really well written book that instilled a lifetime of fascination with the The Zone. Narrators tone is perfect and suitable for the story.

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A must hear.

great narrator, story and characters. A good time all from begining to end. I got immersed in super hard.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

It is good

It is a good book and anyone who is familiar with the stalker franchise would like it.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

An inspiration for so much

Like I suspect many others did, I came here because of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games and others which have been inspired from this legendary work. I wanted to hear it from myself and see where this inspiration came from. It's not what I expected to be sure, but that's not a knock against it.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in inspired by paranormal events taking place around the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site and I thought this was the same, but it's not at all. In this universe, aliens have visited the earth, but seemingly just passing by or having a "Roadside Picnic" on their way to somewhere else, leaving a bunch of their stuff behind, which is very dangerous, but also valuable and has contaminated part of the Earth. Stalkers are the brave (and often foolhardy) explorers who venture into the zone to recover the objects for research or in some cases, black market selling. Things are told from an almost "day in the life" perspective from several of these, as try to eek out a tenous living from this.

You can tell it was written by Russians and in particular, Russians unver Soviet-era oppression. The story is generally bleak and doesn't have happy endings, though a theme of pursuing hope against all odds is present throughout. Some of these Stalkers do what they do because they have to, others do it for further enrichment, and for some, it just provides the excitement and risk they crave to find meaning in life. It doesn't try to explain everything or lay out a definitive reason why the aliens did what they did, if they'll ever come back and if humans will ever be able to handle what was left behind. It just takes the stance of "this is the world now and these are the people living in the core of it". It's cynical and dark, but also tries to impart that if we hold on for something better, we might be surprised occasionally.

You need to be in a certain mood to take this book in, but I quite enjoyed it and its unique collision of sci-fi and real-life. If you are a fan of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and want to see where it started from, this is a great read.

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