A while back I picked up Roadside Picnic from the super sale section on the Kindle store. I understand it's considered to be a sci-fi classic by the Russian brothers Arkaday and Boris Strugatsky. Wasn't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be a fascinating read.
The story is set in Russia, the site for one of several extraterrestrial visits. Little (if anything) is known about the visitors. Most of the knowledge is gleaned from the sites of their visits. The geography has changed in visible and invisible ways. It affects those who enter the sites, both government scientists and renegade "stalkers" who scour the zones for discarded alien artifacts and technology to sell on the black market.
You are invited to follow one of the stalkers through years of exploration of the zone, the politics and sociology of the alien visits and how humanity copes with and understands knowledge power.
I really wanted to like Roadside Picnic more than I did. I'm a sucker for evaluating society through the lens of science fiction. But in what is probably a stroke of genius overall Roadside Picnic provides more questions than answers. Some stories lend themselves to interpretation/subjectivity, but I really wanted a few more firm answers. It may have also been partially that this is a translation from a Russian novel written a decade or so before I was born. In that sense it was enormously fascinating. It's interesting to see how similar we all are as people. Regardless of nation or creed, we all ask many of the same questions and seek to define ourselves and the world in similar terms.
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