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My book-long conversation with Roadside Picnic:

Me: "Really? We're not alone?! The Aliens are here?!"

RP: "Well... they were here. They've gone home now."

Me: "But they've left heaps of amazing stuff for us? Cool!"

RP: "Yeah, it's kinda cool, except, well... what they left might actually be alien trash, and they don't seem to have even noticed us."

Me: "Oh... right. But they visited several places on Earth, yeah? So at least there's lots of alien trash to analyse?"

RP: "Yeah, except all the zones they visited are now thick with weird traps. It's pretty much suicide going into one."

Me: "So.. what you're telling me is that aliens turned up, ignored us, trashed the place, and buggered off back to Andromeda or wherever?"

RP: "Yep."

Welcome to the world of Roadside Picnic, the novel Tartovsky' famous film Stalker is based on.

Aliens have visited several places around the world. The spots they visited are strewn with strange artifacts that defy our understanding, the products of a strange and advanced science. Large areas around the visitation sites are uninhabitable, and barely traversable at all- strange and deadly gravity effects, areas of sudden incinerating heat, pools of glowing jelly that destroy metal as easily as they do flesh- these and other horrors infest these sites.

People who have been exposed to the zones are often altered, and their children are born with strange mutations, despite there being no measurable radiation in the zones.

Naturally governments have restricted access to the zones, and send scientists on lethal missions to acquire the items within to discover the secrets of alien technologies.

Equally naturally, smugglers - known as Stalkers - risk their lives sneaking into the zone to retrieves items for the black market, feeding a thriving trade in alien tech.

One of the most successful of these Stalkers is Red Schuhart, a man who has entered and returned from the zone many times, often with priceless alien loot. He's a working stiff kind of guy, always on the verge of being broke and constantly tempted to chase the big bucks he can earn as a Stalker. The narrative follows him, and through him we learn of the nature of the zones, what they can do to the people who enter them and their effect on the world at large.

But while Red's story is interesting, for my money the meat of this novel is contained within the ideas that underpin it. The central premise - that alien visitors stopped on Earth and left behind strange artifacts that we do not fully understand, artifacts that will change the course of our history - is not unique, but the reason behind these visits is; the aliens were just stopping by on their way somewhere and either didn't notice us or considered us beneath their attention.

They weren't here for first contact, or to raise us up. They merely stopped for a 'roadside picnic' and the powerful artifacts, the reality-distorting and deadly zones - all of these are nothing more than discarded bits of pieces of junk and swathes of pollution from their activities, much like a group of humans might toss a few beercans around a campsite and leave a stinking puddle of oil behind from their leaking car.

I loved this idea. It turns the underpinnings of the story completely away from the usual directions Alien technology focused stories take, which is usually something to do with the discovery of world-changing tech left on a distant world by a long-dead alien race whose origins are now lost in the mists of time, blah-blah-snore. This scenario is over used in SF, so the Strugatsky brothers' take on the trope is a refreshing as a mysteriously hydrating drink made with long-lost alien technology, ie: quite refreshing.

The whole story is intriguingly tainted by the feeling that the tech that has been found could just be junk, that the main characters are risking their lives for alien beer cans, and that humanity, so important in our own eyes, is of so little consequence to greater powers that they arrive, mess up our backyards and leave without so much as a Take-Me-To-Your-Leader. This shadowing makes an already fairly grim story even grimmer, but I liked the darkness in Roadside Picnic, and the heavy mood that pervades much of the story.

This novel is influential for good reason, and it's well worth your time. Roadside Picnic is dark, fascinating and original.