Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo.

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 heady tide of scientism, used to answer with an unquestioning Yes. The Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem called it “the myth of our cognitive universalism.”