An alien civilisation passed briefly through Earth and left again without ever noticing the people who lived on it. What it left behind are six Zones — patches of ground where the ordinary laws of physics no longer hold, littered with objects of impossible power and impossible danger, discarded the way a picnicker leaves rubbish at the side of a road.
Harmont, the small town that grew up on the rim of one Zone, has built an economy on that rubbish. Redrick Schuhart is a stalker: he slips past the cordon at night and brings artifacts out, because it is the only work he is any good at and the only work that pays. Around him the physicist Valentine Pilman tries to explain what the Visitation actually was, the Institute supplier Richard Noonan works covertly against the trade in smuggled artifacts, and the veteran stalker Burbridge takes whatever the Zone will let him carry. Over eight years the Zone costs Red his friends, his nerve and his family's future, and he keeps going back — finally toward the sphere that is said to grant any wish a person can put into words.
First published in the Soviet magazine Avrora in 1972, Roadside Picnic is the source of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker — for which the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay — and of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games. Olena Bormashenko's 2012 translation restores text cut by Soviet censors and carries a foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin.