A strange, slightly halting novel, essentially composed of four days' narrative across eight years. I picked this up after hearing the excellent episode on it for the Backlisted podcast, having also seen Tarkovsky's film Stalker several times and thinking, generally, I might find it interesting.

And interesting it definitely is, although the book manages to be both like and unlike what I had anticipated. Since Backlisted made some overt comparisons to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I had perhaps expected more of a tonal similarity: the creeping horror and dread, the sense that the characters' senses may be betraying them. There's a little bit of that here, but it's consumed much more in a kind of crushingly banal hopelessness. Why did the aliens come? No one knows. Will they be back? No one knows. What does it all mean? No one knows. Does anyone care about anything anymore? No one knows... It's a very bleak narrative, all the more so because the characters are aware it will probably get even bleaker. The horror isn't creeping: it's everywhere.

i think a much stronger point of comparison would be the contemporaneous novels of Philip K. Dick. Dick had a peculiar way of depicting a world that was always about 15% out of joint, mostly quite recognizable but with new ideas or concepts introduced a terribly offhand manner. There were rarely any "establishing shots" in a Dickian novel; you were left to grasp at thin pieces of description or make guesses from context clues. That kind of thing is all over Roadside Picnic: what's hell slime? What's prickly heat? Who's the Gopher? Why is someone named Four-Eyes? Is a "reanimated corpse" slang, or a literal description? You get some sort of answer for all of these, but sometimes they're half-answers, and sometimes they're almost non-answers, where you're left to make terrible assumptions of your own based on a few fragments of data.

is it a good book? Well, this modern 2003 translation reads easily, and it definitely leaves you thinking. But a lot of its "appeal" is in depicting people at their most basic, trying to survive in a world they don't understand, trying to comprehend and sometimes ignore its inherent bleakness. There's a powerful metaphor there, so yes, I think it's fair to say it's a good book and one that will stick with you a while. But it'd also be reasonable for you to put down the book at the end and say, "Is that all there is?" The plot really isn't very much, or terribly important. It's the overall effect of it, and the unanswered questions of it, and the melancholy of it, that will stick with you. ( )

Another one of those "classic" sci fi novels that I'm glad I read because it is an important book to the genre and has a lot to say, but I probably won't ever touch again. I enjoyed a lot of elements of it, but the third section (there's four sections total) contributed absolutely nothing in my opinion and I'm still trying to understand its purpose. It's pretty easy to see how much this book influenced future writings. I actually enjoyed the afterward by Boris Strugatsky more than the book itself, discussing the difficulties in getting the book published at the height of Soviet realism gripping their art culture. ( )

Dark and gritty Soviet science fiction. It has a video game-like quality. The characters and their nicknames are well-conceived. The overall crushing cynicism has a Russian feel to it. ( )

Interesting idea, well executed. Thinly veiled comment on the Russian societal background. ( )

Awesome world and story. I'm still just discovering Russian sci-fi, but this is already one of my favorites. ( )