Larry Klaes’ email bulletin contained a glowing review of a newly released translation of an SF novel by Russian writers A. and B. Strugatsky. It is particularly noteworthy for what I believe is a totally fresh SF premise: Aliens vist earth, apparently unnoticed, and leave behind at a handful of sites extremely dangerous but very valuable artifacts. The artifacts apparently are trash discarded by the visitors, hence the title.

No one can figure out how they work, and some have phenomenally useful properties, but getting and using them can be deadly, and the “Zones” where they are located are highly polluted. No gratuitous
snarks, puh-leeze.

I’ve just started reading Roadside Picnic, (Chicago Review Press)

http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/catalog/showBook.cfm?ISBN=1613743416

Here is an excerpt from the foreword by Ursula K. Leguin

Science fiction lends itself readily to imagininative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can’t afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it’s all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in “We” to bring the censor down upon him. The Stragatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government’s policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then, and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology–something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men wrote.
***
The question of whether human beings are or will be able to understand any and all information we receive from the universe is one that most science fiction, riding on the heavy tide of scientism, used to answer with an unquestioning Yes. The Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem called it “the myth of our cognitive universalism.” Solaris is the best known of his books on this theme, in which the human characters are defeated, humbled by their failure to comprehend alien messages or artifacts. They have failed the test.

I’ll let you know what I think after I’ve finished it.