"Want a drink?"
"Thank you, I don't drink."
"How about a smoke?"
"Sorry, I don't smoke either."
"God damn it," I say. "Then what do you need money for?" ( )

Did not work for me. Though it started out good, when the chapters skipped to years in the future, I lost interest. There did not seem to be a larger story structure and the stalking became a bit repetitive.
Hopefully, the film is better. ( )

Yes I know it's supposed to be a classic, and it certainly addresses some interesting issues on the nature of intelligence and mankind's place in the universe as alien artifacts (or alien trash?) threaten the very fabric of a society already sliding into decay. And could there be a little social satire, Soviet-style, going on as pragmatists and dreamers battle it out? But it didn't hold my interest and that final meltdown was anticlimactic. Perhaps it had more layers in the original Russian? ( )

too verbose, obviously

An entertaining story written in the USSR in the 1970s about a world that was visited briefly by an alien race that could best be described as litterbugs. The aliens never made any attempt to communicate with humans and are now long gone, but the detritus that they left has had a lasting impact. As a result the areas where they visited have been cordoned off and access is strictly limited.

Although the authors say otherwise, I wonder if the idea of the Zones stems from what happened in Chelyabinsk-40 in 1957. I read in [book:Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster|40538681] that a nuclear accident occurred in the southern Urals that resulted in the release of highly radioactive contamination across the Urals—2 million curies of it—falling in a deadly trace six kilometers wide and nearly fifty kilometers long. It resulted in the creation of a highly secret forbidden zone that sounds very similar to the forbidden zones described in this novel. I can easily imagine that news of these events would have spread about by word of mouth and that writers could incorporate them into their stories, perhaps without even knowing that they are describing something that isn't entirely fictional.

Eventually ten thousand people were ordered permanently evacuated over the course of two years. Entire settlements were plowed into the ground. Twenty-three villages were wiped from the map, and up to a half million people were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity.
Rumors of what had happened in Mayak reached the West, but Chelyabinsk-40 was among the most fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War.
Although it would be decades before the truth finally emerged, the Mayak disaster remained, for many years, the worst nuclear accident in history.

The edition that I read included an introduction by the great [author:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602] that praises this book highly and includes these scathing remarks about those would reject such works out of hand.

A time, also, when a positive review of a work of Soviet science fiction was a small but real political statement in the United States, since part of the American science fiction community had undertaken to fight the Cold War by assuming every writer who lived behind the Iron Curtain was an enemy ideologue. These reactionaries preserved their moral purity (as reactionaries so often do) by not reading, so they didn’t have to see that Soviet writers had been using science fiction for years to write with at least relative freedom from Party ideology about politics, society, and the future of mankind.

My thanks to the folks at the The Evolution of Science Fiction group at Goodreads for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books. ( )