Roadside Picnic
[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]:

> Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explanation. No one saw the visitors. Their presence caused disease and blindness in the areas where they landed. Now, in the six "Zones", the laws of physics (and, seemingly, of reality) are disturbed by anomalies, and littered with inexplicable, deadly wreckage. Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale. Some of these artefacts offer the promise of extraordinary powers. Unlike Tarkovsky's film, which concentrates on the hallucinatory, vacated landscape of the zones, the novels portray a society adapting to an inexplicable, terrifying event, an eruption of the unknown. Though written in 1971 and published in English in 1977, the novel was heavily bowdlerised by Soviet censors, and an authoritative text wasn't available in Russian until 2000. It's a book with an extraordinary atmosphere – and a demonstration of how science fiction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel.

Original Title: Пикник на обочине


  [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
science fiction, Russian science fiction, alien visitation, anomalies, Russian fiction
Аркадий Натанович Стругацкий, Борис Натанович Стругацкий
Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky was born in Batumi, Russia. While he was a child, he moved with his family to Leningrad. In 1942, Leningrad was under siege and he left with his father, who did not survive the trip to Vologda. Arkady was later drafted into the Soviet Army, and in 1949 he graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. He worked as a teacher and interpreter for the military until 1955. From 1955 he began to work as an editor and writer. In 1958, he began his lifelong collaboration with his brother Boris. || Boris Natanovich Strugatsky was born in Batumi and later moved with his family to Leningrad. During World War II, his father and his older brother left the city, and his father died upon reaching Vologda. In 1950 he graduated from high school and went on to study astronomy at Leningrad State University. In 1955 he graduated and began working as as an astronomer and computer engineer. In 1966 he quit to write full time with his brother Arkady. He died in Saint Petersburg on November 19, 2012.