Brothers Strugatsky "Picnic on the Roadside"

«Roadside Picnic"- a book that is sure to appeal to lovers of fiction and literature about aliens. After all, it was the visit by aliens of our planet that formed the basis of the plot of the work.

Though idea of ​​a visit by newcomers to the planet Earth the writers have been using for a long time, the plot of the Strugatsky brothers' book "Picnic on the Roadside" can not be called jaded. He is not just fascinated - the book is written in such a way that it is impossible to tear yourself away from it.

So, the basis for writing the book Arkady and BorisStrugatsky took the aliens' landing on our planet. At the landing sites, as it turned out later, the life of people and animals is simply impossible. Therefore, out of these points, the entire population was urgently evacuated. Scientists begin to carefully study these zones of alienation and various objects - artifacts, which remained after the aliens. Soon there is an assumption that all these artifacts are nothing but space debris forgotten by aliens after a picnic on Earth.

Artifacts with different strengths, verypeople are interested, so they are sold for a very large amount of money on the black market. But who takes them out of the zones of alienation? This is done by stalkers - people who risk their lives for money. That's Redrick Schuhart, the protagonist of the book, can no longer live without constant visits to the exclusion zone. Having visited it once, you always want to return there. Nobody can understand this attraction, except for other stalkers.

In the exclusion zone itself, everything is not so simple: it is full of various anomalies that not only move around the terrain, but also "live" their lives ...

Quotations from the book

«- Praying? - I ask. "Pray," I say, "pray!" Further to the Zone, closer to the sky ...

- What? He asks.

"Pray!" I scream. - Stalkers are not allowed to turn into a paradise! "

"It's a terrible thing, why do we like it whenwe are praised? Money from this will not increase. Of glory? What glory can we have? "He was famous: now three people knew about him." Well, let's say four. Funny creature man! .. It seems that we love praise as such. As children - ice cream. Inferiority complex is, that's what. Praise bears our complexes. And very stupid. "

"The Hypothesis about God, for example, gives an incomparable opportunity to understand absolutely everything, absolutely without knowing anything."

"And now no one knows what it is -an ulcer, a treasure chest, an infernal temptation, a Pandora casket, a devil, a devil. Twenty years have been puffing, billions have been slaughtered, and organized plunder could not be established. Everybody does his own small business, and the scientists of the forehead broadcast with an important air: on the one hand one can not but acknowledge, and on the other hand one can not disagree, since the object, being irradiated with an x-ray at an angle of eighteen degrees, emits quasi-thermal electrons at an angle of twenty-two degrees. "