Roadside Picnic, and Stalker the Tarkovsky film based on it, are very high on my list favorites. Roadside Picnic is kind of parallel to Clark's Rendezvous with

Roadside Picnic, and Stalker the Tarkovsky film based on it, are very high on my list favorites. Roadside Picnic is kind of parallel to Clark's Rendezvous with Rama. They're both about a chance encounter with alien life, or more specifically, the technological trappings of alien life. And both stress out insignificance and ultimately irrelevance to the more highly developed aliens. Rendezvous with Rama strikes me as more optimistic, I think because the protagonists are all high up the ladder--chosen astronauts. The protagonists of Roadside Picnic are akin to black market smugglers, and that creates a dirtier world, and makes our position relative to the never seen aliens seem so much more puny and underdeveloped.