Picnic by the Roadside

SF writers typically approach alien contact in grandiose terms, but the Strugatsky brothers wonder instead, "What if it is more like a 'Roadside Picnic?'" Aliens trekking through space find they have to rest a spell and land on Terra, for lunch, a little r & r, perhaps a smoke. After an interval--ho......more

What will happen if human mind comes across transcendent phenomena? Roadside Picnic is an attempt of an answer to this impossible question. The houses in the Plague Quarter are peeling and lifeless, but the windows are mostly intact, only so dirty that they look opaque. Now at night when you crawl by,......more

I play video games, now and again, but I don't care about being 'good' at them. I'm not competitive about my skills. I'm interested in the story, the characters, and the world. After a particularly irritating series of losing battles, I frustratedly told a friend "I don't want to have to spend a bun......more

In April 1986, a major nuclear disaster took place at the Chernobyl power plant, an hour’s drive north of Kiev (then USSR). A radioactive cloud spread across the whole of Europe in the following days. Millions were contaminated. The nearby city of Pripyat became a ghost town. In the aftermath, some......more

This book tells how conceited Space Aliens don't consider the inhabitants of Earth quite in their level of development (inferior), which gives us the title of the book. The invaders treat our planet like a huge dump, trash everywhere, green slime, unknown articles which don't smell like flowers, the......more