I've been scouring used book stores for years for a copy of Roadside Picnic, and I finally found a (new!) SF Masterworks edition at Half Price Books. Roadside Picnic is the source material for one of my favorite films, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.
Not surprisingly, Roadside Picnic is the source for Stalker in the same sense that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the source for Blade Runner. The films take place in the same universe as the books and cherry-pick certain details, but they tell fundamentally different stories. Stalker is about human desire and faith; Roadside Picnic is about our lack of understanding and agency.
Thirteen years before, aliens visited a half-dozen sites on Earth. No living humans saw them, but they left behind a variety of artifacts and strange phenomena: inseparable disks that float 18 inches apart ("empties"), perpetual motion bracelets, sticks that reflect light on a delay, areas of intensified gravity ("bug traps"), drifting clouds of intense heat. The Visit sites are sealed off, but there's a robust black market in alien artifacts lead by stalkers, who sneak into the Zone to bring them out. In fact, there's an entire social system based around this trade.
The action is well presented, but the most interesting thing about Roadside Picnic is that it deals with the aftermath of alien contact rather than the contact itself, and with the effect on everyday folks rather than experts. We learn how the alien artifacts work but have no idea what they actually are, and we live our lives based on social forces instead of personal desires.
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