But one of the most favoured is that the Earth received some sort of 'visitation' by aliens who were simply passing through. So why is such a tale called ' Roadside Picnic'? Well there are several ideas as to how the zones came into being. Roadside Picnic is his tale and in it he goes into the very centre of one such zone. So it takes a special kind of person who is prepared to risk everything to go into these zones to retrieve these artefacts. Yet the deserted zones are dangerous places. These artefacts are valuable and scientists are desperate to study them. However something keeps the plates parallel and fixed relative to one another. There is nothing between them and you can even pass your hand in the space. Empties are two parallel copper discs each a quarter of an inch thick and the size of a saucer with about a foot and a half between them. For example one class of artefact are nicknamed 'empties'. Nobody knows exactly where these artefacts came from and they are as mysterious as the zones themselves. There are mysterious forces such as small spots where gravity works differently, and then there are the artefacts.
Today the zones are all deserted for within them there are pockets of danger. For example when zone manifested within part of an industrial town, the people panicked and fled, and then, later, they died as if of a plague. These zones were originally normal areas, be they towns, countryside or whatever, but now they have been strangely altered.
Set in the near future (which is actually the end of the twentieth century but then the story was (I guess) written in the 1960s), a number of mysterious zones appear on the Earth. More than this, this is a non-Anglophone SF gem (the Strugatski brothers are Russian) that deserves to be treasured. Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic reviewed Fiction Reviews
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