Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, romanized: Piknik na obochine, IPA: [pʲɪkˈnʲik nɐ ɐˈbot͡ɕɪnʲe]) is a philosophical science fiction novel by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky that was written in 1971 and published in 1972. It is their most popular and most widely translated novel outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky counted 55 publications of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries. The story is published in English in a translation by Antonina W. Bouis. A preface to the first American edition was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Stanisław Lem wrote an afterword to the German edition of 1977. Another English translation by Olena Bormashenko was published in 2012, with a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky. The book has been the source of many adaptations and other inspired works in a variety of media, including stage plays, video games, and television series. The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers. Later, in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, the first installment of a video game franchise taking inspiration from both the book and the film, was released as well. The term stalker (сталкер) became a part of the Russian language and, according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, stalkers are people who trespass into the forbidden area known as the Zone and steal its valuable extraterrestrial artifacts, which they later sell. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden or uncharted territories; later on, urbexers and fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.