How long does it take to read Roadside Picnic?
Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Natanovich Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Natanovich Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky takes about 3 hours 7 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 7 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1978. 170 pages, about 46,750 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 12 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 7 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 22 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explanation. No one saw the visitors. Their presence caused disease and blindness in the areas where they landed. Now, in the six "Zones", the laws of physics (and, seemingly, of reality) are disturbed by anomalies, and littered with inexplicable, deadly wreckage. Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale. Some of these artefacts offer the promise of extraordinary powers. Unlike Tarkovsky's film, which concentrates on the hallucinatory, vacated landscape of the zones, the novels portray a society adapting to an inexplicable, terrifying event, an eruption of the unknown. Though written in 1971 and published in English in 1977, the novel was heavily bowdlerised by Soviet censors, and an authoritative text wasn't available in Russian until 2000. It's a book with an extraordinary atmosphere – and a demonstration of how science fiction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel. Original Title: Пикник на обочине
Subjects: science fiction, Russian science fiction, alien visitation, anomalies, Russian fiction, Fiction, science fiction, general
