Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.

The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing

It all had to change. Not one life and not two lives, not one fate and not two fates—every little bit of this stinking world had to change