![]() That’s the hell slime radiating from the basement. “At night when you crawl by, you can see the glow inside, as if alcohol were burning in bluish tongues. ![]() The event is known as The Visit, the areas where they touched down are known as Zones, and the remnants the aliens left behind are deadly. Roadside Picnic happens in a world where undescribed aliens landed, stayed for a while, and left again–all without making actual contact with humanity. But in the midst of that brush with nothingness it also presents us with a glimpse into the inner workings of human faith. Roadside Picnic forces the reader to consider humanity’s self-defined place in the cosmos, and in its own quiet way taps into the primal well of weird fiction by making that place very small, and very insignificant. The prose is direct, with little decoration. The story is often prosaic, its events inexplicable, its conclusion tantalizingly inconclusive. First published in Russia in 1972, its most recent translation (by Olena Bormashenko) was put out in 2012 with a foreword by Ursula K. ![]() ![]() Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a strange and affective science fiction novel-classic, understated, and far deeper than it initially seems. ![]()
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