except for the two words ‘Stalker’ and ‘Zone.’” The result, Tarkovsky said, has “nothing in common with the novel. When Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Roadside Picnic for his 1979 film Stalker, he dropped all the novel’s personae except Red, whose character he completely changed threw out all its incidents changed its themes and eliminated all alien artifacts from the Zone. Olena Bormashenko’s myriad improvements in word choice, punctuation, and phraseology make her rendition more fluent, vivid, and substantive. Bouis (1977), treat yourself to this new one, which is based on the authors’ original text. He hates what the Zone does to people, the betrayals that have become coin of the realm around it, and “the foul scum that had grown on the Zone, gotten rich by the Zone, fed, drank, and fattened from the Zone, and didn’t give a damn.” Red’s adventures and development over the eight-year span of the novel culminate in its tragic and sublimely ambiguous ending.Įven if you’ve read the earlier translation by Antonina W. Yet he genuinely loves his wife and mutant daughter and incessantly struggles with the rage seething inside him. Red is hardly a conventional sf hero: he is ruthless, insolent, and addicted-to alcohol, nicotine, violence, and, especially, the Zone.

The Strugatskys focus on a single stalker, Redrick Schuhart.

But others sneak in, seeking alien artifacts to feed the thriving black market that has sprung up around the Zone. Those who enter legally are scientists or military. Now, thirteen years later, entry to the Zone near the town of Hartmont is restricted. From a nearby cemetery, corpses rise to rejoin their families. Some who live near a Zone are inexplicably infected with hitherto unknown genetic or phenotypic mutations. Regions of each Zone manifest deadly apparent violations of physical law. To humans, the detritus the visitors left behind is, variously, inscrutable, invaluable, or very dangerous. Only afterward did they discover six “Zones” where “Visits” took place. In Roadside Picnic, the aliens have come and gone. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), the encounter goes badly. More often than not, as in this story’s ur-text, H. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky tackle this centuries-old theme via one of the great stories of science fiction: First Contact, the first encounter of humans with entities not of this earth. Its lighthearted title notwithstanding, Roadside Picnic ( Piknik na obochine, 1972) is a serious inquiry into the consequences for humans of prolonged proximity to the Unknown, with all its marvels, dangers, and ineffability.

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.

Strugatsky picnic