It’s doubtful we’ll ever meet aliens, so science fiction will reimagine the first encounter an infinite number of times. I enjoy first contact stories, even after reading hundreds of them over the last sixty years. I couldn’t help but think of an eight-legged version of the Boston Dynamics robot called Spot. Boris thinks they are intelligent machines, but Sergeyev describes them as looking like dog size spiders. Boris Yanovich gets to interact with them, but there is no real communication. In “The Visitors” we have a very simple account of aliens landing and two humans observing them gather cars, sheep, cows, and other odd bits, before leaving. “The Visitors” was written during the height of UFO mania, but the story structure and description of events reminds me of The War of the Worlds. His boss, Boris Yanovich Lozovsky, ultimately volunteers for an encounter of the fourth kind by becoming a storaway on the alien’s ship. Sergeyev, an archaeologist, who tells a first person story of meeting an alien, and then later quotes from his boss’s diary left at the landing site which describes a close encounter of the third kind. It’s a matter-of-fact account by one observer, K. “The Visitors” lacks the originality that we discover in Roadside Picnic, but is still a good story. I’ve lost count of the number we’ve read so far in The Big Book of Science Fiction. “The Visitors” is yet another first contact story. However, the Wikipedia entry for that novel makes no mention of this earlier story about the visitors. This older story feels like a trial run for the Strugatskys famous 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. “The Visitors” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky appears to have been written in 1958 according to, but it gives no original Russian publication source.

Story #31 of 107: “The Visitors” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction

Arkady and boris strugatsky