Childhood's End
The definitive transcendence novel and a permanent fixture of all-time-best lists; its imagery of giant ships over cities has been borrowed by everything from V to Independence Day.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Roadside Picnic about?
Aliens came, stayed briefly, and left without noticing humanity — like picnickers leaving a verge strewn with wrappers, batteries and things no ant should touch. The six Zones they left behind break physics casually and kill carelessly, and Red Schuhart, a 'stalker' of the Harmont Zone, smuggles artefacts out for buyers who understand them no better than he does, while the Zone's aftermath warps his daughter into something soft-furred and silent. The famous ending — Red at the Golden Sphere, the wish-granting artefact, with a borrowed prayer he doesn't believe and can't improve on — is post-war SF's most desperate benediction: happiness for everybody, free, and let no one be left behind.
Why it matters
The most influential Soviet SF novel: Tarkovsky's Stalker, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, the Metro books and the Zone as global cultural concept all flow from it; 'roadside picnic' is now shorthand for indifferent first contact.
Read next
Dawn
The opening of Xenogenesis, Butler's masterwork of unsentimental first contact — a fixture of university courses on posthumanism and the standing rebuke to comfortable alien-saviour stories.
The Fifth Season
Hugo winner 2016 — first volume of the unprecedented three-peat — and an instant canon entry: the most influential fantasy novel of its decade, on syllabuses from sixth forms to doctoral programmes.