Roadside Picnic. Time of Choice

The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky do not need an introduction to readers. Their works are a well-established classic not only of science fiction but of modern Russian literature as a whole.
From the simple to the complex, from "The Land of Crimson Clouds" and early novellas and stories through "The Snail on the Slope" and "Roadside Picnic" to "The Doomed City" and "The Weight of Evil" — such a creative path has been traveled by the brothers over thirty years of their writing career. The path is stony — accompanied by consistent reader success on one hand, and on the other — a wary attitude from the high literary establishment. The reasons are clear: the unpredictability of their behavior in literature and the suspicious atypicality of the characters, whom the authors place before a difficult but necessary choice — either to remain human and row against the current of the world, or to float evenly downstream at the whim of the villainous lame fate.