Books like Roadside Picnic
Years after unseen visitors stopped briefly on Earth and left behind six Zones full of lethal anomalies and priceless artefacts, Red Schuhart makes his living as a stalker, slipping into the Zone outside his town to bring out what he can sell.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Roadside Picnic
Annihilation
A biologist enters a mysterious quarantined zone where nature has gone terrifyingly wrong, and realises the expedition before hers was not what it seemed.
Nova Swing
In Saudade City, on the edge of an event site where the laws of physics have broken down, Vic Serotonin makes a living taking tourists into the site, while Detective Lens Aschemann investigates what comes out of it.
The Physiognomy
Physiognomist First Class Cley, who reads character from the shape of a face for the ruler of the Well-Built City, is sent to the mining town of Anamasobia to find who stole the white fruit of paradise.
Borne
In a ruined city stalked by Mord, a giant flying bear, Rachel, a scavenger, finds a small green creature caught in Mord's fur and takes it home, against the wishes of her partner, Wick, who deals in biotech that alters memory.
The Three-Body Problem
During the Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie answers a signal from space, and decades later nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao, investigating a wave of scientists' suicides, is drawn into a strange virtual-reality game and the secret behind it.
Blindsight
First contact with an alien species so incomprehensible that the crew sent to meet them questions whether consciousness itself is an evolutionary dead end.
Solaris
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the research station hovering over the ocean planet Solaris to find one of its three scientists dead, the other two barely holding together, and people walking its corridors who should not be there.
Rosewater
In 2066 Rosewater is a town in Nigeria built around an alien dome that opens once a year and heals whoever is nearby, and Kaaro, a government agent who can read minds, starts to notice that people like him are dying.
The War of the Worlds
A cylinder falls from the sky onto Horsell Common in Surrey, and the narrator, a writer living nearby, joins the crowd that gathers round it as its top begins to unscrew.
The Other Side
An artist invited to a remote 'Dream Realm' in Central Asia watches the impossible city and its exiled population collapse into entropy and violence.
The Lathe of Heaven
A man in a near-future Portland discovers he can reshape reality through his dreams, and a psychiatrist tries to exploit the power to fix the world.
Our Lady of Darkness
Franz Westen, a widowed writer of weird fiction in San Francisco, spots a pale figure waving from a hilltop he can see from his window, and comes across an old book on the haunting powers of great cities.