Roadside Picnic / Tale of the Troika

Retail EPUB - 1976 Edition! In Roadside Picnic Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those strange misfits who are compelled by some unknown force to venture illegally into the Zone and, in spite of the extreme danger, collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the Zone and the thriving black market in the alien products. Even the nature of his daughter has been determined by the Zone. And it is for her that Red makes his last, tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile depths... Tale of a Troika is a very different thing indeed--so different that it might have been written by quite different authors. How much you like it will depend on your taste for satire and lampoon. The Strugatsky fury - and it is fury: disgust with hypocrisy, with bureaucratic bumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truth and of initially decent human motivations - their fury is laced with laughter, rich with [...]scorn, effervescent with the comic spirit. This novel can be considered a direct sequel to Monday Begins on Saturday , at the end of which the main character is told he will be sent to Kitezhgrad for a business trip, and that is where this version of Tale of the Troika takes place.  The novel exists in two slightly different variants - Smena and Angara, by the names of the magazines in which they were published. They differ by characters and some plot lines and was caused by Angara editorial request to fit the novel for the magazine volume. The other version takes place in Tmuskorpion' (literally: "darkness-scorpion", a pun with "Tmutarakan", which is a cliché for a remote, obscure place; tarakan means cockroach, hence the pun), on a previously unexplored and unreachable floor of the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry.