Roadside Picnic

It is a generally expected thing that if there is a book one wants to read - one should be able to find it, either at a library or a bookstore. 

It annoys me to no end when there is something specific I want to read and it is not available because it is out of print, or has been banned, or has never been translated, or some other nonsense like that.

It started with a movie. I was 12 or 13 when I watched Tarkovsky's "Stalker." It became the paragon of science fiction for me. I had never seen anything like it before. I understood enough to know there was hidden meaning there, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I remember nearly hyperventilating with excitement and asking my mom: "But what does that all mean? Why can't they go this way? Why is he lying there? WHAT IS THIS?" My mom would shrug and say something along the lines of "the director overdid it to that point it becomes meaningless," and then, trying to explain a specific scene, she said "I can't remember exactly, but in the book..." And there was me, like a hunting dog picking up a scent. A book - did she say there was a book - where is the book?

I spent the next, oh I don't know, 7 or 8 years looking for that book, the "Roadside Picnic" by brothers Strugatskie, the book that "Stalker" was loosely based on. We had a couple of their science fiction novels at home, but not that one. No one in the extended family had it. None of our friends had it. The bookstores didn't have it. The library didn't have it. I would wonder around flea markets where people would be selling their book collections (this was the early 90's, some people were forced to sell their stuff to make the ends meet) - nothing. Sure, people have heard of it - both my mother and my aunt had read it and liked it - but they couldn't remember where they got their copies from or what happened to them afterwards.

In 1994, we came to the US. I didn't forget about the "Roadside Picnic" but I more-or-less gave up on it. After all, there were plenty of other books to read. I continued to love science fiction (but nothing had the same impact as "Stalker"). I continued to love science. I went to college - a big state school known for it biochemistry department. One day, I was wondering through the university library stacks, checking out their Russian section, and - what do you know - there was a collection of works by Arkadiy and Boris Strugatsky. It was a new edition that came out in 1994 - the year we emigrated. And there was "Roadside Picnic" on the shelf, and I couldn't believe my own eyeballs.  I spent so much time and so much effort looking for that book back in Russia and Latvia. I never expected to stumble across it in the United States - how weird was that? (And how ironic was that? Almost as ironic as the fact that it wasn't until I came to a capitalist country that I met a real-life Socialist.)

Were there any books you've spent years looking for?

I do  have a couple more I want to mention - all children's books - but that's for another post.