Since it was written in 1971, well before the Chernobyl disaster, it's not surprising that the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic doesn't appear in the article. The book's theme and narrative are so redolent of Chernobyl, however - telling about perilous journeys into the Zone, an area infested with inexplicable, often invisible, and frequently deadly remnants of some alien Visitation - that the comparison is almost irresistible. Some of the caretakers of Chernobyl call themselves "Stalkers"[1] after the book's name for those venturing into the Zone (and also the name of Tarkovsky's film adapting the novel) for example.
With this in mind, if you've read Roadside Picnic it's hard not to see a reference to it in the article's closing words:
For 30 years, authors have heaved their imaginations into the Zone, trying to crack the riddle of the sarcophagus—how to make sense of Chernobyl? Their imperfect answers keep the question alive.
Ah, it's explicit in a paragraph in the intro which I had not previously noted:
The background and some terminology of the game ("The Zone", "Stalker") are borrowed from the popular science fiction novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker that was loosely based on it, as well as Stalker, the film's subsequent novelization by the original authors. The term "Stalkers" was later used for the scientists and engineers who explored the interior of Chernobyl's "sarcophagus" after its hasty construction in 1986. In addition, 'The Zone' is also a term used to refer to the 30 kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, established after the accident.
there are some claims that the Zone was inspired by the Japanese fortifications (deep underground, booby-trapped, etc. The largest fortress of them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqIbImIWIRI (6000 sq. km, stationed 100K soldiers)) in Manchuria where the older brother served soon after the WWII. Great writers, they distilled this image of "Zone" which as result can be successfully applied to Chernobyl and to whatever comes in the future.
I read (can't remember where) that one of the brothers had a friend who had been evacuated from a town near Chelyabinsk 65 which was the site of a very serious accident in 1957, actually worse in some ways than Chernobyl. He had described the contaminated zone around there in graphic detail and the Strugatskys had used the idea for an alien visitation.
With this in mind, if you've read Roadside Picnic it's hard not to see a reference to it in the article's closing words:
For 30 years, authors have heaved their imaginations into the Zone, trying to crack the riddle of the sarcophagus—how to make sense of Chernobyl? Their imperfect answers keep the question alive.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_%281979_film%29