History Literature / RoadsidePicnic

* LifeImitatesArt: Roadside Picnic is about people going into a hazardous zone to retrieve items of value. The production of the film adaptation, ''Film/{{Stalker}}'', exposed many of the crew to hazardous chemicals in abandoned industrial sites and power plants in Estonia. Later, when the UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} Disaster occurred people who returned to the Exclusion Zone to retrieve their valuables were called "stalkers".

** Resulting in a sarcastic fan-made ending:
-->[[spoiler:— Happiness for everyone, for free, and so that nobody would walk out disappointed!]]
-->[[spoiler:So the Ball bit everyone's legs off. And nobody [[ExactWords walked out.]]]]

* CoversAlwaysLie: Some covers show a Stalker holding an AK47 Assault rifle in an attempt to market the book to fans of the video game series, despite the fact that Stalkers in the book not only avoid guns, but Redrick actively mocks someone for bringing one into the zone. Other editions of the book use an image from the climax Film Adaptation, which takes place in a different location than the book's climax and isn't a location in the book.

This is where the 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.

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. A licensed TabletopRPG (based on the book) called ''Stalker: The Sci-Fi Roleplaying Game'' published by the Finnish Burger Games was released in 2008, with an English translation released in 2012. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''TabletopGame/MutantYearZero'' and even being embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} ([[LifeImitatesArt and its Exclusion Zone]]) and similar areas. [[LifeImitatesArt You really can hire a stalker to sneak you to Pripyat illegally.]]

A final interesting lexical note - "stalker" is not a translation. The Brothers really liked [[GratuitousForeignLanguage the English word "stalker"]] and transliterated it into Russian. But since they didn't speak English well at the time, they mispronounced it "stahl-ker" rather than "staw-ker", and it remains pronounced so in Russian-language works like the film and games. And of course "stalker" here means "somebody moving slowly and carefully, constantly expecting trouble", not "somebody who obsessively follows and harasses another".

* ForHappiness: [[spoiler: "HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!"]]

----

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: "Alien" here means "mostly incompatible with terrestrial life". Where to start? There's a dense 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 hundred times stronger than normal]] (in other words, step in and go splat on the floor)...yhe "meat grinder" that...um... well, take a guess...The Zone is littered with the bodies of scavengers that serve as markers for places where you really shouldn't go.

->'''Noonan''': I see. A [[TitleDrop roadside picnic.]]

* AmbiguouslyHuman: 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.
* AmputationStopsSpread: Burbridge comes in contact with [[GreyGoo Witches Jelly]] while in the Zone which starts to slowly dissolve his leg bones. A doctor amputates them below the knee to stop the Jelly from eventually killing him.
* ArtificialLimbs: After his stint with Witches Jelly that cost him the lower halves of his legs, Burbridge gets a pair of prosthetic legs made with technology developed by research in the Zone.

* 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, chasing them for a couple of blocks on foot. 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.
* BlueAndOrangeMorality: Two characters [[{{Discussed}} discuss]] Xenology midway through the book. One an engineer (Pillman), another a business man (Noonan). It largely centers around classifying intelligence, and the closest humans can come up with a definition for it is "displays human reasoning".
* BodyHorror: [[GreyGoo Witches Jelly]] dissolved the leg bones of Burbridge. The description of what it did to the flesh isn't pretty either.

* ButForMeItWasTuesday: The Visitation changed everything for humanity, but for the aliens that caused it, it might as well have been just a [[TitleDrop Roadside Picnic]].

* CareerEndingInjury: [[spoiler: Burbridge's encounter with the Hell Slime/Witches Jelly [[BodyHorror dissolves his legs]], no more Stalking for him]].

* EldritchLocation: The Zone itself. Whatever the Visitation was, it left the region filled with bizarre entities, patches of lethally broken physics, and the artifacts with their own strange properties.
* EndOfAnAge: The last chapter has this tone. Life around the Zone slowly achieves a sense of normality. Most of the original "old-school" Stalkers are dead, disabled or moved on. Most artifacts have already been picked and the remaining ones are being collected by remote-controlled drones instead of Stalkers. [[spoiler: Redrick's and Arthur's expedition to find the Golden Sphere is supposed to be one last hurrah for Redrick, he intends to retire after this.]]
* EvenEvilHasStandards: Subverted. In the first chapter Redrick states that no stalker (including SmugSnake Burbridge 'The Vulture') will ever bring [[GreyGoo "witches jelly"]] out from Zone (other translations call it "hell slime"). [[spoiler: In the second chapter Redrick and Burbridge are doing exactly that.]]
* EverythingTryingToKillYou: "Alien" here means "mostly incompatible with terrestrial life". Where to start? There's a dense 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 hundred times 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 markers for places where you really shouldn't go.

* 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; one of his friends retains a butler heavily mutated by exposure to an unspecified anomaly. When his son goes into the Zone, he brings along a pistol with one bullet in it, just in case.
--> Come back with Swag, a miracle. Come back alive, success. Come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck. Everything else, that's fate.

* 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 page out of a comic book (junk), and an oil slick (hazardous anomaly), but on human scale. In fact, the discussion is the page quote.
* IDidWhatIHadToDo: This is Redrick's reasoning for taking some highly dangerous "Witches Jelly" out of the Zone and selling it to the military. They'll pay really well and he needs to [[PapaWolf support his family]].
* ImportedAlienPhlebotinum: Arguably a [[DeconstructedTrope deconstruction of the trope]], via [[PossessionImpliesMastery Possession not implying mastery]]. Just because they can study the artifacts and put some of them to use doesn't mean they've made any progress understanding how they work. One of the biggest breakthroughs during the story is figuring out what the "Empties" ''might'' have been used for.
* InsignificantLittleBluePlanet: Dr. Pilman's theory (which has given the novel its name) is that the landing site was merely the aliens' road stop on the way to somewhere else.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Redrick does a lot of very questionable things. He also does some good, genuinely cares for his family, and eventually makes a [[spoiler: SelflessWish ForHappiness]].

* LowCultureHighTech: Humanity makes considerable strides by repurposing Zone tech, but even over decades they never quite figure out the artifacts' true purpose or how exactly they work.
* MakeAWish: The function of the golden ball. [[spoiler:Red ultimately chooses a SelflessWish, though [[NoEnding the results of it remain forever unknown]].]]

-->[[spoiler:So the Ball bit everyone's legs off. And nobody [[ExactWords walked out]].]]
* MikeNelsonDestroyerOfWorlds: a deconstruction, with the aliens being Mike and the humans being stuck dealing with the aftermath of whatever they did through accident or indifference.

* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: One notable stalker is known as "the Vulture," apparently for leaving others to die while he returns with the loot himself. No one really likes or trusts him, not even Redrick.
* {{Mutants}}: Red's daughter has fur and a tail; his friend's butler is severely deformed (and mentally disabled) by exposure to the Zone. It's stated that the children of Stalkers are born with various anomalies, another side effect of the Zone.

* PapaWolf: Redrick is very protective of his {{mutant}} daughter. Also, in an inversion, he's very protective of his zombie father (who's harmless) and became physically violent when scientists came to grab him for experiments.

* SufficientlyAdvancedAlien: The general theory on the origin of the Zone; a collection of scraps and residue from unfathomably advanced technology scattered throughout the Zone, left behind either by a crashed alien spacecraft...or by one dumping its trash on an InsignificantLittleBluePlanet after "a picnic" in the countryside.

* 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 when they realize that the weirdness of the Zone is following them.
* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman: The protagonist's daughter is born with fur and a monkey tail, gradually becomes less human and more feral as the story proceeds, until his wife sobs: "The doctor says... She isn't human anymore."

''Roadside Picnic'' (''Пикник на обочине'') 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.

->'''Noonan''': I see. A [[TitleDrop roadside picnic]].

->'''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'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. A licensed TabletopRPG (based on the book) called ''Stalker: The Sci-Fi Roleplaying Game'' published by the Finnish Burger Games was released in 2008, with an English translation released in 2012. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even being embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} ([[LifeImitatesArt and its Exclusion Zone]]) and similar areas. [[LifeImitatesArt You really can hire a stalker to sneak you to Pripyat illegally.]]

A final interesting lexical note - "stalker" is not a translation. The Brothers really liked [[GratuitousForeignLanguage the English word "stalker"]] and transliterated it into Russian. But since they didn't speak English well at the time, they mispronounced it "stahl-ker" rather than "staw-ker", and it remains pronounced so in Russian-language works like the film and games.

* 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.

* BookEnds: Both the first and last chapter, eight years apart, both feature Redrick leading a novice companion on a Stalking expedition to find some artifact of inestimable value.

* ButForMeItWasTuesday: The Visitation changed everything for humanity, but for the aliens that caused it, it was just a [[TitleDrop Roadside Picnic]].

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. A licensed TabletopRPG called ''STALKER The Sci-Fi Roleplaying Game'' published by the Finnish Burger Games was released in 2008, with an English translation released in 2012. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even being embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} ([[LifeImitatesArt and its Exclusion Zone]]) and similar areas. [[LifeImitatesArt You really can hire a stalker to sneak you to Pripyat illegally.]]

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. A licensed TabletopRpPG called ''TabletopGame/STALKERTheSciFiRoleplayingGame'' published by the Finnish Burger Games was released in 2008, with an English translation released in 2012. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even being embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} ([[LifeImitatesArt and its Exclusion Zone]]) and similar areas. [[LifeImitatesArt You really can hire a stalker to sneak you to Pripyat illegally.]]

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} and similar areas.

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

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even was even embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} and similar areas.

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Franchise/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even was even embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} and similar areas.

''Roadside Picnic'' has been loosely adapted to film as ''Film/{{Stalker}}'' (1979). Both the book and the movie have inspired the ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' game series. And the concept of "stalkers" and "zones" spread spread far beyond the Strugatsky brothers, appearing in series like ''Videogame/{{Metro}}'' and ''Videogame/MutantYearZero'' and even was even embraced in real life by scavengers around UsefulNotes/{{Chernobyl}} and similar areas.

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

* [[spoiler:NoEnding]]: [[spoiler:Redrick sacrifices Arthur by allowing the latter to run into the meat grinder, without any warnings, setting it off and killing him almost instantly. With a few minutes to spare before the trap reactivates, Redrick sits and sadly contemplates his actions, debating his supposed morality versus the town's wickedness. He then makes a final decision by walking down to the golden ball, selflessly repeating Arthur's wish for 'happiness for everybody'. The story abruptly ends without showing what happens next, and with the Strugatsky brothers having passed away without leaving any clues, it's left open-ended.]]

* SelflessWish: [[spoiler: The very ending.]]