Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic is a science fiction novel by the Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in Russian in 1971 under the title Piknik na obochine and published in 1972, and it became their most widely translated work outside the former Soviet Union. The novel is set years after a mysterious alien visitation has left behind several Zones scattered across Earth, littered with inexplicable and often lethal artifacts and phenomena, and follows Redrick Schuhart, a stalker who illegally enters the Zones to salvage this alien debris for sale on the black market. The novel's central conceit, that the visitors' garbage is as incomprehensible and dangerous to humans as the debris left behind after a roadside picnic would be to the animals who later stumble upon it, gives the book its title and its philosophical core, and the American edition carried a preface by Theodore Sturgeon while a later 2012 translation carried a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin.