Roadside Picnic

By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky

Narrated by: Robert Forster

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.

A unique Science fiction novel from the USSR.

Road side picnic is an odd tale that brushes on many subjects, from mans place in the universe and deep into humanities imperfections. Its really hard to explain without giving away the details, but if you enjoy a mix of fantasy, mystery, and just a touch of horror, you will love Roadside Picnic.

The performance of the narrator is not perfect. There are times when his volume drops very low and then goes quite high, forcing you to fight with your volume controls. He doesn't do this too often, so the audio book is still a great listen.

Interesting but......

This is not the book I was expecting. Mostly a commentary on the miseries of life and not an exploration of science are science philosophy. There are two good moments, one is an actual discussion of the possible meaning of the artifacts and the other is a description of the artifacts himself. this may be an historical significant book but I can't really recommend it.

Not sure...yet

I started listening to this audiobook because it was recommended based on other books/authors I have enjoyed in the past. While the plot line is interesting, the story itself takes a while to get into, and requires frequent “rewinding” to repeat what is happening to really grasp what is going on. I couldn’t finish, but I’ll give it another try in a few months.

Absolutely brilliant and timeless

This outstanding reading by Robert Forster !!! of a very special story was a happening... what was really happening? Did an encounter happen? Is it all about
gathering "things" from the zone, what is their value costing so many lives? Isn't mankind just digging in the dirt, what is to be human, what does it take to become, to remain an individual?
The Zone helps the herostalker to raise many a question, while working for different buyers of artifacts, some people get rich others, like the military, believe to benefit from the
know how, a scientist becomes rather puzzled in the process... Valuable the afterthoughts by Boris Strugatsky, which brings some context of the writing and publication processes in real Soviet times.
Bizarre, I personally wished the brothers had written that book about their quixotic adventure with ideological superstructure and intellectual garden gnomes. Interesting that Boris Strugatsky was bewildered himself by the battle over this book, they had thought it harmless and he suspected there was something cryptically mythical to it, that even the authors themselves couldn't see.
A. Tarkovsky probably sensed that when choosing the book as the basis for his last film. It took eight years of tedious correspondences to get the story published, heavily edited, although it is in the scifi genre and is set in the West, written by authors from the then Communist East, yet "Roadside Picnic"transcends East and West by raising human questions and
by moving towards the Golden Sphere, towards the center! This is the restored original version... a bravo ! also to Olena Bormashenko, the translator.

A full empty...

Enjoyably unlike any other sci-fi I have before read in that the almost matter of factness that such strange and other worldly things and events are handled.