Roadside Picnic - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, a review

Roadside picnic is a very interesting book. I think the way most people hear about it is via the summary that I first encountered which got me interested in reading it: "Roadside picnic is about stalkers, people who go into "the zone", a mysterious area filled with alien technologies left by aliens who visited earth." Sometimes there is more information, sometimes less, but essentially the purported focus of the book always seems to be on the things that the stalkers do in the zone. Certainly, though I have never seen or played the multiple pieces of media inspired by roadside picnic, that is what those tend to focus on. I do not think that this is the best introduction to the book. To me, the book is one of the very few sci-fi books that chooses to focus not on the aspect of its story that makes it sci-fi (strange technology, aliens, spaceships ect) but instead the impact that these have on the people that are affected by the technology. Roadside picnic is not really about the…