Roadside Picnic

Ardis Studio presents an audio drama based on the novella by the Strugatsky brothers “Roadside Picnic.”

If you haven’t read the novella, haven’t seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, and aren’t especially into science fiction, you might still want to know that, presumably after the visit of aliens to our planet, zones appeared—areas of exclusion. A Zone is something completely different from the rest of the world: unknown, living by its own laws, filled with mysterious objects and anomalies, most of which are capable of killing. People who enter the Zone and bring artefacts out are called stalkers. The main character of this work is a stalker.

One of the main themes of the novella is the moral choice of those into whose hands the artefacts of the Zone fall—how humanity will use them, which doesn’t really understand what the purpose of these dangerous things is, left behind by aliens for some unknown reason. This philosophical novella by the Strugatskys was first published in the Leningrad journal “Aurora” in 1972 and became the most translated into foreign languages work by these writers.