Roadside Picnic

If, like me, you first heard about Roadside Picnic, sometimes called the "greatest Soviet science-fiction novel," because it inspired Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, you should know that going from Roadside Picnic to Stalker feels a little like stepping from an off-track-betting parlor into a cathedral. Not that gamblers aren't looking for God too, but the Strugatskys' novel reads like a boozy, hard-boiled loner story out of Hammett or Cain. Aliens may have visited, and left a mysterious Zone of toxins and marvels in their wake, but what remains, for the most part, are the very human urges of greed, dread, and hope for transcendance.