Reddit reviews Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics)
We found 23 Reddit comments about Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Chicago Review Press
Dude, do give the original book a read. It's called Roadside Picnic, not Stalker, and it's a sci-fi cult classic. It's not in Chernobyl, the original idea is a visit of an advanced alien form beyond our comprehension. The title comes from this analogy made by a character in the book:
>> 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]
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>In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors left, discovering items and anomalies that are ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.
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>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 intergalactic 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. ^[Wikipedia]
The games rewrite the setting into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and do away with the whole alien thing, carrying over the figure of the stalker, anomalies and artifacts, making the NPP accident have the same effect on the environment as the alien visit in the book, and adding a lot of combat because game, so the book brings a lot more stuff to everyone who's played the games, it's pretty meaningful. And there's a lot of "ooohhhh that's why" moments if you're reading after playing, where some game element just clicks when you see where it came from.
Oh, and the book is super short, you can read it in an afternoon or something, and can be had new for ten bucks on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Roadside-Picnic-Rediscovered-Classics-Strugatsky/dp/1613743416 It seems be available on Amazon ('Olena Bormashenko: Translator')
Will post, then add links later...
S.T.A.L.K.E.R is loosely based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 1972 Scifi novel Roadside Picnic and Andrei Tarkovsky's art house film Stalker, which itself is based on Roadside Picnic and shares its name with the game series. There is an English translation of the book available and the movie is available with English subtitles.
I would recommend looking into both of them. I found the novel very interesting, especially because it was written under the USSR. The film is also very good, but definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea.
In March, I read some novels for a change!
Famous Men Who Never Lived, a (I think debut) novel by K Chess. It's a sci-fi novel about being an interdimensional refugee. It was slight, but good while it lasted, and thoughtful. Some guy at a mexican restaurant wanted to know if it was about, like Robin Hood. Don't judge a book by its cover.
The City In The Middle Of The Night, by Charlie Jane Anders. This is a follow-two-people-and-meet-in-the-middle science fiction book set on a planet that doesn't rotate and people are forced to live right on the terminator line. It's got some good horror elements and puts some interesting thought into its setting. The story doesn't go where you think it's going, but you'll like where it goes (probably.)
Roadside Picnic, a classic piece of Russian science fiction, which people are probably more familiar with from the things it inspired, like Tarkovsky's film Stalker, and then the STALKER video games that came from that. Aliens visited our planet, but they didn't notice us. They left their trash behind. Bleak in a very Russian way. Excellent.
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denosovich, the book that shocked the USSR by not being samizdat. It's a slim little thing but says a lot.
Hostage by Guy Delisle. This is the "unusual one" for Delisle, whose books are little sketches of life - it's a telling of someone else's story. This dude was kidnapped by Chechens and held hostage for about three months in 1997, until he escaped. An excellent and baffling story, with excellent artwork.
Have you ever seen the movie Stalker, or read the novel it was based on, Roadside Picnic? They were the original source for the CRPG. They are both classics, and well worth the effort.
Sadly, I doubt that any of the books have been translated more than once into English. Most of the Strugatskys was published by MacMillan in the 1980s as part of their "Best of Soviet SF" series, many of them by Antonina W. Bouis and with forewords by Theodore Sturgeon. (I think I own all of them except Space Mowgli.) It's possible that this 2004 translation of Far Rainbow has a different translator. Daw and Bantam also did a few paperbacks, notably Snail on the Slope and Hard to be a God — oh, man, that cover.
The situation may change now that Chicago Review Press is coming out with a new translation, with a foreword by Ursula Le Guin. Chicago Review Press is owned by one of the big guys, so if it's successful we might see a proper Strugatsky revival. Weee!
Or we could just learn Russian.
Shocked that no one's mentioned Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. A phenomenal post-apocalyptic/post first-contact book that really thrust the genre into the frontlines during the cold war. It's easily one of my all-time favorites.
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers.
You may want to go all the way back to the true beginning and read the book that the movie was based on.
http://www.amazon.com/Roadside-Picnic-Rediscovered-Classics-Strugatsky/dp/1613743416/
Listen, if you really like Russian literature, do yourself a favor, forget Lolita and read some of the earlier Nabokov's work. He wrote Lolita in the states when he needed money, he was trolling for like half the book and it doesn't hold a candle to his real art. Check out "Luzhin's defense" (don't you dare to watch the movie instead - read it first, watch later if you must) and "Invitation to Beheading". Those are his real masterpieces. Not that piece of pseudo-psychopathological crap.
Also, Chekhov. Whenever people tell me they like Russian classic literature I quiz them on Chekhov's works. If you cannot quote at least three phrases from "The Cherry Orchard" verbatim I automatically assume you don't know shit about Russian classic literature :] (jk, I'm not that much of a snob. But seriously his texts have a certain "brain-worm" quality to them, like nursery rhymes they just stick. Of course it has to be a quality translation).
Don't bother with Tolstoy too much for that matter. He might have been a great philosopher and shit but boy does he write heavy. (here's a little secret - few Russians actually read "War and Peace" in its entirety, they have been tortured with this book too much in school). Same with Dostoyevsky - put off reading his books until you're at least 30 if you want to really appreciate them.
As in for more contemporary sci-fi/social drama stuff (and I'm risking being banned from /r/russia for desecrating the holy cow right now :]) - give these guys a try. Start with this (or if you're broke full text here ). Ever wonder where Stalker theme came from? - this is where. Mindblowingly good read and just as creepy.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatski
Anything by Samuel R. Delaney. I particularly recommend Dhalgren. Fair warning: Dhalgren is one of those books that you'll either hate or love beyond reason.
You can find it for as low as $7 on Amazon.
EDIT: For reference, this is the new translation.
EDIT 2: As u/Skullkan6 points out, both of these are the new translation. Damn.
Check out Roadside Picnic Arkady Strugatsky. It is a quick read with some humor, good action, strangeness, aliens (tangentially), and is sort of dystopic. It was written by a Soviet, and sometimes that sensibility doesn't translate so well to the west - but I found it very accessible. I do believe there was a movie and a video game derived from it.
She probably has all of the books you've mentioned if she really likes them, bookish people usually do... A special edition might be an idea, but I won't be able to help you with that, I go for cheap paperbacks due to money ;)
I'm tempted to recommend "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, it's not sci-fi classic per se, but it's a dystopian classic, she would probably like it if she likes Brave New World, but again, she might already have it. Still I'm sure she'd be thrilled to get a thoughtful thank you gift from you, even if she's read it before or even has a copy... Here's a link to that book on amazon, if you want to have a look: amazon link
If she does like classic sci-fi, here are some old-school, hard sci-fi (but it's not all just spaceships and aliens) that she might enjoy and possibly even not have, since a couple of the authors aren't from English speaking countries:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1613743416/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1394926668&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40. I just remembered its actually called "roadside picnic"
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. An interesting, dark scifi novel from Russia.
It just came out this month. Here's a link.
I haven't read Troika yet. What can you tell me about it?
I think this is it in English
This is the newest version if you want to buy:
http://www.amazon.com/Roadside-Picnic-Rediscovered-Classics-Strugatsky/dp/1613743416/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417033653&sr=8-1&keywords=roadside+picnic&pebp=1417033658813
They mention STALKER and Stalker on the cover? And it has a still from Stalker... that's just awesome, I'll have to get this. I heard the original translation wasn't that good.
UK Link
[Roadside Picnic] (http://www.amazon.com/Roadside-Picnic-Rediscovered-Classics-Strugatsky/dp/1613743416)