Reading Notes - Roadside Picnic

I dove back into sci-fi in June, and Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, blew my doors off. The setup is that aliens landed on Earth but didn’t stay. They made no effort to communicate and left a bunch of stuff behind, disrupting society and creating a thriving black market. Redrick Schuhart provides for his family by making repeated, dangerous forays into the nearby Zone that has warped his life and hometown.

Written by two Russian brothers and published in 1972, the book lands one of the best ambiguous endings I’ve read in a while, leaving the reader exhausted, sad, and hopeful. I’ve talked before about being captured by a book’s voice, and Picnic has a strong one. But what I loved was the way it blankets you in a mood—weird, oppressive, skeptical, and resigned—that sets up Redrick’s defining rebellion. Life may be inexplicable—it is also clearly rigged. All we can do is look out for ourselves and survive. Or maybe… be good anyway?