Roadside Picnic

It is unlikely I would have picked up this Russian novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky had it not been the basis for the 1979 film Stalker. In the event, I am glad I did. As the useful foreword explains, this is not the science fiction of generals and geniuses, but of real people, principally the "stalker" Red Schuhart. That an alien civilization would visit Earth and then leave, possibly bored, is the type of contact story not often told. The humans are left to blunder through the items left behind, like animals encountering the remains of a roadside picnic. They reach blindly for understanding, with no tools but a puny intelligence and a living soul.