It is absolutely mad how Roadside Picnic and derived works basically created a fictional setting and subculture that, decades later, was brought wholesale into reality.

Never seen anything like it, and I doubt anything like it will ever happen again.

“Life imitates art.” — Oscar Wilde

Agree. Tarkovski's movie is great also.

I watched Tarkovski's movie for the first time the other night. It was a lot more "artsy" than I expected (in a good way).

I'm curious what you expected...all Tarkovski is like maximum artsy.

It was my first Tarkovski film and I wasn't aware of the directors style.

Try “Andrei Rublev” it’s (watched all his work) one of his more balanced films, as in its full of symbolism but it’s intertwined with the narration, so one may go through it without noticing then subtext, while it’s probably one of the best (if not the best) films about medieval ages.

If you liked it, watch the Russian Solaris. It's interesting to compare and contrast with 2001.

This is an amazing film. It was a real pleasure comparing it to the Hollywood version and also the book. The Hollywood version is also quite good, but focuses on different things (Kelvins relationship with his ex wife, as I recall) than the Soviet version.

Glad to see this comment. I like them both for different reasons, and feel the Clooney one gets trashed on unfairly for not being as art house smart. I thought the score and how it sets a mood was particularly well done.

Note if anyone is curious and goes looking for the trailer, be warned this is one of those movies where the studio edited the trailer to make it look like something totally different than what it is hoping to boost sales.

From the synopsis, looks like it's based on the Asimov novel.

It’s a Stanisław Lem novel.

helps to be in an 'artistic' state of mind. ;-)

I really liked this movie, had a great build up and cool idea/atmosphere.

I like the movie but it’s also the ultimate nap movie.

Tarkowski with 30 minutes nap still beats most other movies by a large margin. I used to hate myself for the nap, but I wonder if I should stop doing that: the sequences work just so well in the nearly dreaming state.

Thank you for alleviating my guilt about also napping during my recent watch of Stalker. It certainly didn't hurt, and I'd agree it helped in an odd way.

I once ran across an inner city neighborhood with 4 friends to see Solaris, due to being a bit late. We got in just in time - I watched it raptly, and at the end of the movie, looked to my left to see all 4 of my friends angelically asleep in the front row of the theater. So Tarkovsky movies are at least 80% in this fashion.

Concur. My all-time favorite sci-fi novel. And that's reading it in the English translation. It must be sublime in Russian.

Did you read Metro 2033? It’s been compared to Roadside Picnic and has spawned a sub-culture, too (exploring abandoned Soviet subways lines and stations)

Metro is to roadside picnick what mcdonalds is to your local high end steakhouse. You can enjoy both, but in different ways. Besides, the st. petersburg trilogy set in the same universe as metro but written by Andrey Dyakov is, in my opinion, far superior to the original series in almost any way (the second book is way too slow). You should give it a shot if you enjoyed the original novels.

Metro 2033 is a solid SF B-grade actioner. Not great, not terrible. It's not even vaguely in the same league as Roadside Picnic.

Related: "Kontroll" (2003) is the first feature film by Nimrod Antal, born of Hungarian parents, raised in Los Angeles, returning to Budapest for this haunting film shot entirely in the Budapest subway during the five hours every night when it shuts down.

"Kontroll" trailer: https://youtu.be/LMkkJbRJdiA

Also related: Ghost Stations of the Paris Metro:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_stations_of_the_Paris_M%...

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x418gva

couple notes.The movie, the book and several original scripts by Strugatskies all have partially different stories and endings (with the endings every time telling different thing).

One of the brothers - Arkady - worked as a translator in the Far East in the beginning of 195x. The large areas on the border there were deeply and strongly fortified areas of Japan Kwantung army which USSR defeated in 1945. The motif of the dangerous zone full of hazards can be traced in the Strugatskies' works from the earlier short stories where the events directly happen at those Kwantung army fortifications to the abstracted Zone in the "Roadside Picnic" and the forest booby-trapped with automated weapons in the "The Inhabited Island".

Second this recommendation. And if you’re used to sci-fi by Western authors, books by Cold War, Iron Curtain authors like Strugatsky, Lem (Polish) and others are fascinating.

Thanks for that, anything in particular by Lem that you recommend getting started with?

I find we get very little exposure to Russian / slavic authors in North America, and when I do occasionally get to read one (including the classics but also some paperbacks) I suspect how much we must be missing by not having more of them readily available and marketed.

"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" punches above its weight for Lem. Solaris is good too. I find Lem interesting but only sporadically enjoyable.

The Strugatskys have gone from being "Roadside Picnic" + a largely unobtainable back catalogue - I expensively amused myself by putting together a collection of pretty much everything they published in English a few years back. They have been celebrated (arguably, over-celebrated) by SF Masterworks and other recent publications so almost everything is back in print.

I enjoyed the new mix-up of "Lame Fate / Ugly Swans" (Ugly Swans was previously published as a standalone book, but is now intertwined with a book about the hassles of dealing with an AI-based evaluator of book quality, the book in question being Ugly Swans). The Doomed City was the original candidate for that, but was too long to fit - that's also available on SF Masterworks.

If you want to see where Iain M Banks extracted a good quarter of his ideas for the Culture, "Hard to be a God" is a decent read.

Lem is pretty accessible, a good place to start might be the Cyberiad collection of short stories. The futurological congress is also a fun read. You can't really go wrong with him, he had a great sense of humour.

I mean… Solaris is amazing and was made into a film at least twice. The book is about the difficulties communicating with an alien in the vein of Arrival, but it predates Arrival by many years and is a better book, in my humble opinion.

The book is much more detailed than the films. For example, in the book they go down to the “surface” of the alien and visit it… more than once as I recall. That’s not in the films.

The great thing about this book is that it's as much about the difficulty of trying to contact an alien as it is about the problems with the scientific process and academia.

Really a fantastic read with so many angles to interpret it from.

I would say Solaris is as much about dealing with regrets, a dull pain from deep wounds that follows us through our lives as it is about the things you mentioned.

I read it more than ten years ago, but still remember the emotional experience it brought.

Solaris is worth a read for sure.

book is amazing, movie is amazing, but much different than the book - really awesome all around.

Thanks for the recommendation!