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Roadside Picnic

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Roadside Picnic

By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
Narrated by: Robert Forster
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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.
 Classics Dystopian First Contact Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Scary
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A classic piece of Russian sf with cynicism posing as realism and characters who exhaust their own selfishness and fear to find something more

The gritty road to wisdom?

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The book was amazing. Narrator was also really good! If you love the STALKER game series and want to know more, this is the book for you. It can be confusing at times, but at the end it pays off. Think about the name of the book ;)

Great book, hits like a ton of bricks.

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Great reading, increadible characterisation. I didn’t realize how much I liked this version of Red until I watched STALKER, and I couldn’t get over Red not being this same character, with this same voice.

I regularly think about the zone, and the possibility of becoming just a stop, just a roadside picnic, for any others out there. If you like a mystical, slow burn sci-fi with a rumble of philosophy beneath, do yourself a favor…

Impressively read, a classic for a reason

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I understood the book but once I finished I felt decidedly unsatisfied.

Aliens land, do their thing and leave some detritus behind.

The detritus area, known as the zone, is rummaged and valuable to humans but have no real purpose other than to be studied. Humans paw all of it trying to see what can be used for the betterment of mankind but none of these items are fully understood.

The protagonist life is centred around the safe retrieval of items which earn him his living, outside of this there is no substance. A constant risking of life for little reward.

There is also the after effects of this visitation where unusual things occur which is kind of interesting in terms of the story but it doesn’t lead to any profound understanding which may be the point. Humans think everything is for them and actually it isn’t. Stuff happens, clearly as a fall out but that is all.

The narrators voice, nice though it was, would be better in a different type of book. He sounded far too mature for the age range of the protagonist who was from the ages of 23 - 32 and the narrator sound 45-55. I overlooked it for the most part but it interrupted how the character looked in my imagination.

So a resounding feeling of dissatisfaction and the thought, well in the scheme of the universe our planet is insignificant, humans are interesting but what is out there isn’t about humanity, it just is and somethings are for others. I didn’t need this story to tell me that which I already knew.

Meh

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The articulation of the narrator was horrible. Six and a half hours of mumbling.

Great book, awful voice narration!

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