Roadside Picnic

"Yes, Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. It is what Tarkovsky’s great and weird film Stalker is based on. The story, like a lot of Soviet science fiction, is set safely outside the Soviet Union in a capitalist wasteland, where interesting things can happen that you can talk about! Some aliens that are incredibly powerful arrive briefly on earth and then bugger off again leaving some ambiguous and very frightening objects behind them, which the book says are rather like the wrappings and empty bottles left at the side of the road after people have stopped their car for a picnic and gone on again. Around these mysterious objects, which may or may not have the power to grant wishes, a whole desperate shanty town of prospectors and chancers has grown up. The thing about Soviet science fiction is that it was actually far freer than Soviet literary fiction to do interesting, bold, satirical, avant-garde things. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful."