Roadside Picnic
Pilman: Imagine a picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car drives off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out of the car carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Gas and oil spilled on the grass. Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around. Rags, burn out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind. Oil slicks on the pond. And of course, the usual mess- apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's penknife, torn newspapers, comic, faded flowers picked in another meadow.
Noonan: I see. A roadside picnic.
Pilman: Precisely. A roadside picnic, on some road in the cosmos.
A novel by the Strugatsky Brothers. If you haven't read it, you've probably seen the film it inspired (Stalker) or played the game Inspired By both of them (STALKER).
Roadside Picnic, like the above titles, focus on the Alienated Zones, where debris and items ejected by visiting extraterrestrials are concentrated. These Zones are filled with bizarre anomalies and physics-defying objects, ranging from having the sun appear to stay still all the time, to two pieces of metal that forever repel and attract each other. Needless to say, scientists pay hefty prices to study the objects, but the United Nations controls access to the Zone.
These are where Stalkers come in, illegal intruders who brave the patrols and the dangers of the Zones to bring back the artifacts for sale and study. The story focuses on one particular Stalker, named Redrick.
- Badass Normal: Redrick, definitely. It's a survival requirement in his profession.
- Berserk Button: Don't try to harm Redrick's family. When his grandfather turned into a zombie and they came to take him for study, Red threw two orderlies and three doctors out of his home.
- Came Back Wrong: People buried in the zone reanimate, but they can't think for themselves, only imitating people near them. Even more strangely, severed body parts will still act on their own.
- Changing of the Guard: Zig-zagged. Redrick's the POV character for the first two chapters, only to be replaced by a middle-aged engineer named Richard Noonan in the third chapter, who, in-turn, is replaced with Redrick in the final chapter.
- Eldritch Location: the Zone itself. So. Very. Much.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Subverted. In the first chapter Redrick states that no one stalker (including Smug Snake Burbridge 'The Vulture') will never bring "witches jelly" out from Zone. In the second chapter Redrick and Burbridge are doing exactly that.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: "Alien" here means "mostly incompatible with Terran life". Where to start? There's a heavy fog that turns your bones into jelly. A spider-web that gives you a heart attack hours after you've touched it. Spots where gravity is hundredfolds stronger than normal (in other words, step in and go splat on the floor)... A "meat grinder" that... um... well, guess... The Zone is littered with the bodies of scavengers that serve as marks for where you shouldn't go.
- ET Gave Us Wi-Fi: Here, this trope is transferred into the future: Humanity makes considerable progress by studying and finding uses for the artefacts found in the Zone -- even if scientists admit that they understand little about how and why these artifacts work, they have found out what they do and invented ways to put them to use.
- Fate Worse Than Death: Some things in the Zone will kill people. Some things won't. One stalker loses the bones in his legs and becomes unable to walk, but survives because Red spends a day dragging him out of the Zone. When his son goes into the Zone, he brings along a pistol with one bullet in it, just in case.
- Forbidden Zone
- Human Sacrifice: There's no religious aspect, but this is basically the function of the meat grinder in front of the golden ball--it'll deactivate for a few minutes if something large and organic is thrown into it.
- Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Arguably a deconstruction of the trope.
- Insignificant Little Blue Planet: Dr. Pilman's theory (which has given the novel its name) is that the landing site was merely the aliens' road stop on the way to somewhere else.
- Lovable Rogue: Redrick Shuchardt
- Make a Wish: The function of the golden ball. Red ultimately chooses a Selfless Wish, though the results of it remain forever unknown.
- Ruins of the Modern Age
- Sympathetic Inspector Antagonist: Captain Quarterblood.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Kirill Panov and Arthur Burbridge, the two young, nice and most idealistic characters in the book, die in the same chapters where they are introduced.
- Twenty Minutes in The Future: Apart from a few technological advances, the setting seems largely congruent with the time when the novel was written. Though from today's perspective, it possibly could be more adequately classified as an Alternate History setting.
- Weirdness Magnet: Anyone who was near a Zone at the time of the Visitation became this. It takes twenty years for the authorities to notice because it's not immediately obvious. One case study is a barber who left the city, but his clients had a 90% mortality rate over the course of a year due to various freak accidents. At the beginning of the book they are paying people to leave the Zone so that they can build a military perimeter around it, but that policy is soon reversed.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The protagonist's daughter is born with fur and a monkey tail, and gradually becomes less human and more feral as the story proceeds, until his wife sobs, "The doctor says... She isn't a person any-more."