Tale of the Troika
245, pagine
lingua English
Pubblicato il 01 Gennaio 1977 da Macmillan.
Roadside Picnic is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called the Visitation that took place in several locations around the Earth, simultaneously, 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 properties. The title of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman, who compares the Visitation to a picnic.
The idea behind the title is fantastic. The creativity is amazing, but the story itself seemed a little clunky, maybe due to the translation/cultural differences. It's a very 70's Russian science fiction story. Recommended if you like that era.
I picked this up based on the media that has been influenced by it, like the Tarkovsky film, the STALKER games, Metro 2033, Tales of the Loop etc. Usually when you move from the influences and adaptations and return to the source work, you find a tighter and more concentrated version of what came after but with Roadside Picnic almost the opposite is true. Having consumed quite a bit of media that borrow from the tense, otherworldly horror of RP's Zone sections I was unprepared for the breadth of the book. I didn't expect it to, by turns, become a Noirish thriller, a jet black comedy, and a philosphilical treatise on human nature and capitalism.
It seems to me that this should be on every SF enthusiast's 'required reading' list but it doesn't seem like many people bother to read it and that's a huge shame. Especially because it says …
I picked this up based on the media that has been influenced by it, like the Tarkovsky film, the STALKER games, Metro 2033, Tales of the Loop etc. Usually when you move from the influences and adaptations and return to the source work, you find a tighter and more concentrated version of what came after but with Roadside Picnic almost the opposite is true. Having consumed quite a bit of media that borrow from the tense, otherworldly horror of RP's Zone sections I was unprepared for the breadth of the book. I didn't expect it to, by turns, become a Noirish thriller, a jet black comedy, and a philosphilical treatise on human nature and capitalism.
It seems to me that this should be on every SF enthusiast's 'required reading' list but it doesn't seem like many people bother to read it and that's a huge shame. Especially because it says so much in so few words: 145 pages from start to finish. I've read so many big SF&F trilogies that use ten times as many pages to say a tenth of what the Strugatskys say here.
