(I was reminded of the way the characters in the Dark Tower books use the objects left behind by the old ones, only in Roadside Picnic, the knowledge gap is even greater.) This lack of information might annoy some readers, but, like Tom, I enjoyed the mystery of it. The scientists and stalkers find uses for some of them, but they don’t understand how they work or if they’re even using them correctly. As Tom at Wuthering Expectations notes, we don’t learn much of anything about what all these objects do. When the novel begins, he’s turned his skills as a stalker into a legitimate career as a research assistant in a lab that’s attempting to uncover what these gadgets do. The main character, Red Schuhart, is a stalker, the name given to the people who visit the Zones where the aliens have landed to pick up the gizmos scattered around and then sell them on the black market. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, now available in a new translation from the Russian, tells of a world that is quite literally picking up the pieces after an alien visit. Thirteen years ago, they came and they departed, leaving behind pins and empties and shriekers and other detritus, all there for the taking if you’re brave enough to make your way into the deadly-and forbidden-landing zones.
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