Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky (4.5 stars)

This is a fascinating first-contact story as seen through the perspective of a Russian smuggler. The contact itself is entirely unusual: aliens have come and gone, and left humanity a bunch of alien artifacts in a series of 'Zones'.

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras . . . A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about . . . Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp . . . and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow . . .” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

The artifacts are both incredibly useful and, more often than not, inexplicably deadly.

These suits are completely safe from the burning fuzz, for example. And from Satan’s blossom and its spit...

The government and smugglers (stalkers) are all intent on finding and extracting these artifacts for their own gain. The story follows a stalker, Red Schuhart, initially in the first person, then somewhat surprisingly in the third-person with more POVs added. Red's character feels very Russian, he has a fairly bleak world outlook, a very dry sense of humour, and there's a LOT of drinking involved. His monologue was one strengths of the novel:

I take out the flask, unscrew it, and attach myself to it like a leech

I'll walk on my teeth, never mind my hands. I'm no novice. 

This is an amazing thing, by the way: anytime you come in, these barmen are always wiping glasses, as if their salvation depended on it.

At times it heads into fairly dense philosophy, and I felt my attention straying somewhat.

It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

I appreciated the complexity, and getting a taste for the Russian-ness, of the characters.  But what I really wanted was people to go back into the Zone and do more exploring. What calamity would befall the next adventurer! Instead we are left with only a couple of very small tastes of such a fascinating concept.

4.5 stars.