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Roadside Picnic

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Roadside Picnic

By: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
Narrated by: Robert Forster
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Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.
 Classics Dystopian First Contact Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Scary
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A classic piece of Russian sf with cynicism posing as realism and characters who exhaust their own selfishness and fear to find something more

The gritty road to wisdom?

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The book was amazing. Narrator was also really good! If you love the STALKER game series and want to know more, this is the book for you. It can be confusing at times, but at the end it pays off. Think about the name of the book ;)

Great book, hits like a ton of bricks.

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Great reading, increadible characterisation. I didn’t realize how much I liked this version of Red until I watched STALKER, and I couldn’t get over Red not being this same character, with this same voice.

I regularly think about the zone, and the possibility of becoming just a stop, just a roadside picnic, for any others out there. If you like a mystical, slow burn sci-fi with a rumble of philosophy beneath, do yourself a favor…

Impressively read, a classic for a reason

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The articulation of the narrator was horrible. Six and a half hours of mumbling.

Great book, awful voice narration!

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For a westerner listener and reader this was a very fresh view of world and I liked how weird things are descriped partly mundane and already beloning to the world. Must listen.

Something special, not pre-chewed.

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