If so, what does that say about the economy and culture of exploitation that's arisen in the zone town? Or about someone like Red, one of the few people with the instinct and drive to reach the heart of the zone and the Solaris-esque wish fulfillment mechanism that awaits him there? Roadside Picnic has one of those ambiguous endings that threw me for a loop at first, but the more I reflected on its connection all the layers of commentary in the book, the more powerful it became. As one scientist points out, the visitors might have simply been advanced beings on some equivalent of a casual holiday, leaving their litter behind them for the local creatures to scavenge. Like Stanislaw Lem's brilliant Solaris, it uses the incomprehensibility of the truly alien as a mirror to human psychology and our ideas concerning our place in the universe. If this were a typical US or British sci-fi novel, we might expect Red and the scientists to set to work solving the puzzle of the artifacts and eventually figure out the motives of the aliens, but this book has a different, more subtle set of concerns. The protagonist is a rough-necked former stalker nicknamed Red, who is working for the scientists at the outset of the book, but hasn't lost his swaggering, cynical view of human nature or his distrust of authority. Then there is a subculture of people called "stalkers", who go into the zone illegally to gather artifacts for sale on the black market. The population of this town breaks down into roughly two central camps, the first being legitimate scientists studying the artifacts the aliens left behind - though no one is really certain that such mysterious beings actually "left", or even that they were "there" in person in the first place.
Roadside Picnic is set in a small town close to a zone in North America (given the bleak tone and character attitudes, the authors undoubtedly had good reason not to use their own country). People who go in run a high chance of being killed (or being unkilled, in the case of corpses that come back to life). The zones are very hazardous places, full of dangerous substances and weird phenomena, many of which defy all current human understanding of physics and even causality. The story begins about a decade after aliens of some sort landed on Earth, bringing several strange "zones" into existence. It's as gripping as any recent book, and, with a few minor updates, could have easily worked in the present day.
I was impressed with this short 1970s Russian science fiction novel, which still feels pretty fresh and original.
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