History Literature / RoadsidePicnic

* BerserkButton: Don't try to harm Redrick's family. When his father turned into a zombie and they came to take him for study, Red threw two orderlies and three doctors out of his home. When he comes back for the van driver, he finds the van empty, since the driver's already run away in fear during the commotion.

* BerserkButton: Don't try to harm Redrick's family. When his father turned into a zombie and they came to take him for study, Red threw two orderlies and three doctors out of his home.

* ETGaveUsWiFi: Here, this trope is transferred into the future: Humanity makes considerable progress by studying and finding uses for the artifacts found in the Zone -- even if scientists admit that they understand little about how and why these artifacts work, they have found out what some of them do and invented ways to put them to use.

* BerserkButton: Don't try to harm Redrick's family. When his grandfather turned into a zombie and they came to take him for study, Red threw two orderlies and three doctors out of his home.

* {{Mutants}}: Red's daughter has fur and a tail; his friend's butler is severely deformed (and mentally disabled) by exposure to the Zone.

A licensed TabletopRpg called ''TabletopGame/STALKERTheSciFiRoleplayingGame'' published by the Finnish Burger Games was released in 2008 with an English translation released in 2012.

* AmbigiouslyHuman: The children of stalkers suffer from mutations, but no one knows why. Richard Noonan wonders if it's a form of AlienInvasion, with the visitors intent on changing humanity to their liking. He's drunk off his ass when he think this, however.

%% * EldritchLocation: The Zone itself. %% Zero Context Example. Please provide context.

* ImportedAlienPhlebotinum: Arguably a [[DeconstructedTrope deconstruction of the trope]].

* ForbiddenZone

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired a video game, ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' (2007).

* TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth: [[spoiler:Kirill Panov and Arthur Burbridge, the two young, nice and most idealistic characters in the book, die in the same chapters where they are introduced.]]
* TwentyMinutesInTheFuture: Apart from a few technological advances, the setting seems largely congruent with the time when the novel was written. Though from today's perspective, it possibly could be more adequately classified as an AlternateHistory setting.
* WeirdnessMagnet: Anyone who was near a Zone at the time of the Visitation became this. It takes twenty years for the authorities to notice because it's not immediately obvious. One case study is a barber who left the city, but his clients had a 90% mortality rate over the course of a year due to various freak accidents. At the beginning of the book they are paying people to leave the Zone so that they can build a military perimeter around it, but that policy is soon reversed.
* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: The protagonist's daughter is born with fur and a monkey tail, and gradually becomes less human and more feral as the story proceeds, until his wife sobs, "The doctor says... She isn't human anymore."
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* FateWorseThanDeath: Some things in the Zone will kill people. Some things won't. One stalker loses the bones in his legs and becomes unable to walk, but survives because Red spends a day dragging him out of the Zone. When his son goes into the Zone, he brings along a pistol with one bullet in it, just in case.

* EldritchLocation: The Zone itself. [[PunctuatedForEmphasis So. Very. Much.]]

* EldritchLocation: the Zone itself. [[PunctuatedForEmphasis So. Very. Much.]]

''Roadside Picnic'' (''Пикник на обочине''), like the above titles, focuses on the Zones of Alienation, where debris and items left behind by visiting extraterrestrials are concentrated. These Zones are filled with bizarre anomalies and physics-defying objects, ranging from the sun appearing to stand still all the time to two pieces of metal that forever repel and attract each other. Needless to say, scientists and collectors pay hefty prices to acquire the objects, but access to the Zones, which are deadly enough in their own right, is strictly controlled by the United Nations.

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired a videogame, ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' (2007).

-->[[spoiler:So the Ball bit everyone's legs off. And nobody walked out.]]

A novel by the Creator/{{Strugatsky brothers}}. If you haven't read it, you've probably seen the film it inspired (''Film/{{Stalker}}'') or played the game {{inspired by}} both of them (''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'').

Compare Wiki/SCPFoundation.

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* BlueAndOrangeMorality: Two characters [[{{Discussed}} discuss]] Xenology midway through the book. One an engineer, another a business man. It largely centers around classifying intelligence, and the closest humans can come up with a definition for it is "displays human reasoning".

* HumansAreCthulhu: {{Discussed}}. Dr. Pillman states that the Zone is something like a fieldmouse stumbling into an abandoned campsite and finding a burnt-out spark plug (swag), a candy wrapper (junk), and an oil slick (hazardous anomaly), but on human scale.

* HumansAreCthulhu: {{Discussed}}. Dr. Pillman states that the Zone is something like a fieldmouse stumbling into an abandoned campsite and finding a burnt-out spark plug, a candy wrapper, and an oil slick, but on human scale.

''Roadside Picnic'' (''Пикник на обочине''), like the above titles, focuses on the Alienated Zones, where debris and items left behind by visiting extraterrestrials are concentrated. These Zones are filled with bizarre anomalies and physics-defying objects, ranging from the sun appearing to stand still all the time to two pieces of metal that forever repel and attract each other. Needless to say, scientists pay hefty prices to study the objects, but the United Nations controls access to the Zone.

These are where Stalkers come in, illegal intruders who brave the patrols and the dangers of the Zones to bring back the artifacts for sale and study. The story focuses on one particular Stalker, named Redrick.

* ChangingOfTheGuard: Zig-zagged. Redrick's the POV character for the first two chapters, only to be replaced by a middle-aged engineer named Richard Noonan in the third chapter, who, in-turn, is replaced with Redrick in the final chapter.

* EvenEvilHasStandards: Subverted. In the first chapter Redrick states that no one stalker (including SmugSnake Burbridge 'The Vulture') will never bring [[GreyGoo "witches jelly"]] out from Zone (Other [read De-censored] translations call it "hell slime"). [[spoiler: In the second chapter Redrick and Burbridge are doing exactly that.]]
* EverythingTryingToKillYou: "Alien" here means "mostly incompatible with Terran life". Where to start? There's a heavy fog that turns your bones into jelly. A spider-web that gives you a heart attack hours after you've touched it. Spots where [[GravitySucks gravity is hundredfolds stronger than normal]] (in other words, step in and go splat on the floor)... The "meat grinder" that... um... well, take a guess... The Zone is littered with the bodies of scavengers that serve as marks for where you shouldn't go.
* ETGaveUsWiFi: Here, this trope is transferred into the future: Humanity makes considerable progress by studying and finding uses for the artifacts found in the Zone -- even if scientists admit that they understand little about how and why these artifacts work, they have found out what they do and invented ways to put them to use.

* OurZombiesAreDifferent: They're mostly intact, except for the brain. Rather than being inimical to humans, they"exude good health".

Compare TheSCPFoundation.

* AdaptationDisplacement: Both the film and the game series are more well known than the novel; though this is turning around a bit since the original novel began replacing the mangled release that the Soviet Union allowed in the first publication.

* ETGaveUsWiFi: Here, this trope is transferred into the future: Humanity makes considerable progress by studying and finding uses for the artefacts found in the Zone -- even if scientists admit that they understand little about how and why these artifacts work, they have found out what they do and invented ways to put them to use.

-->[[spoiler:— Happines for everyone, for free, and so that nobody would walk out disappointed!]]

->'''Pilman''': Imagine a picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car drives off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out of the car 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? Gas and oil spilled on the grass. Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around. Rags, burn out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind. Oil slicks on the pond. 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, comic, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

''Roadside Picnic'', like the above titles, focus on the Alienated Zones, where debris and items ejected by visiting extraterrestrials are concentrated. These Zones are filled with bizarre anomalies and physics-defying objects, ranging from having the sun appear to stay still all the time, to two pieces of metal that forever repel and attract each other. Needless to say, scientists pay hefty prices to study the objects, but the United Nations controls access to the Zone.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: "Alien" here means "mostly incompatible with Terran life". Where to start? There's a heavy fog that turns your bones into jelly. A spider-web that gives you a heart attack hours after you've touched it. Spots where [[GravitySucks gravity is hundredfolds stronger than normal]] (in other words, step in and go splat on the floor)... A "meat grinder" that... um... well, guess... The Zone is littered with the bodies of scavengers that serve as marks for where you shouldn't go.

* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: The protagonist's daughter is born with fur and a monkey tail, and gradually becomes less human and more feral as the story proceeds, until his wife sobs, "The doctor says... She isn't a person any-more."