Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine, IPA: [pʲɪkˈnʲik nɐ ɐˈbotɕɪnʲe]) is a science fiction novel by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971 and published in 1972. The story leads among other works of the authors on the number of translations into foreign languages and publications outside the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky has counted 55 publications of "Picnic" in 22 countries.
The story is published in English in a translation by Antonina W. Bouis. A preface to the first American edition (MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1977) was written by Theodore Sturgeon. Stanislaw Lem wrote an afterword to the German edition of 1977.
The term "stalker" became a part of the Russian language and, according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the context of the book, a stalker is a person who breaks the prohibitions, enters the Zone and takes out various artifacts from it, which he then usually sells and thereby earns a living. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, this term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates in various forbidden and uncharted territories; later on, fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers.
