Аркадий Натанович Стругацкий, Boris Natanovich Strugat︠s︡kiĭ, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic (Folio Society)
lingua English
Pubblicato da Folio Society.
A troubled man leads a writer and a scientist into "The Zone", a mysterious area where the laws of physics no longer apply. All three journey towards "The Room", which supposedly has the power to fulfill the innermost wishes of anyone who enters therein.
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.
