Chicago Review Press Roadside Picnic: Volume 16

I had only ever seen the movie version of this story so it was significant surprise to find that the original setting for the story isn’t somewhere in the former Soviet Union, but in fact appears to be Canada. An even bigger surprise, and a most welcome one to me as Kipling fan, was to discover in Arkady Strugatsky’s afterword in this book, that the authors’ derived the word Stalker from the character 'Stalky' in Kipling’s Stalky and Co stories.Both the film and book have different but equally melancholic endings. However the novel might be said to have the ultimate happy ending, depending on what you believe the protagonist is actually thinking in the last paragraph…

Be prepared for extra long chapters with no good places to stop reading... (193 pages, only 5 chapters!) though its doubtful you'll want to, once you start getting into it.The plot is a bit non-linear and tends to jump a few years at each chapters.The ending is... breathless.Abrupt, maybe a bit too open, but certainly perfectly in tone for this story; once you get the time to regain your sanity and think about it.As far as I can tell, the book has little resemblance to the movie or video games (a.ka. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Though I guess you could say that the movie was closer to the meaning, while the game only took the basic idea of the zone and expanded A LOT about it. (Admittedly because they didn't really had the copyright to do an adaptation... oups!)So what's Roadside Picnic?Well one day a alien "event" - we could simply call them alien, but no one really knows, ok? - crash to earth and change the lives of almost everybody overnight. Suddenly, the whole market is about finding artifacts that we don't know how to use, hoping we get the upper hand before other countries find out what all this was really about. And it is all really absurd, you see... except it was also absurd before the event, and it is hard to tell how worst it has turned since everything is going down the drain anyway.Our main character used to go in on the side, offering unusual and hard to get prizes to independent corporations. Except, he is not doing this anymore. It's all legit work now. For the hopes of others.Until his own world fall apart a second time.How far would you go before you realize you have gone too far?How wretched one can turn in the search of the impossible?Is the Stalker using the zone in order to live, or is the zone itself stalking mankind for its unfathomable goals?In the end though, it's all about an ordinary man being imposed an extraordinary question.Would you trust yourself to build the answers?Strongly recommend to fans of "Annihilation" (2018), or of Phil K. Dick's deconstructions.

Set in a contemporary time, in the town of Harmont, Canada - where aliens came and went. While on their journey, they stopped on Earth briefly before moving on - a "Roadside Picnic" - and discarded "waste", which to humans represent unfathomable alien technology and wondrous artefacts. The UN has locked these "zones" down and blocks access, so it is left to the "stalkers" (alien artefact hunters) to sneak in and navigate deadly and unknown alien traps in order to find and retrieve their treasures.This novella is so well written that you will be left wanting more after the last page is turned. The back-story is intriguing: Russian sci-fi written in the heart of the cold war, restricted publication and distribution, and Soviet-era censorship - it adds to the mystique of the story. It has spawned a movie, and a trilogy of video games (which I bought off Steam). The story has authentic characters, wondrous adventure, and a timeless allure. It's a haunting classic of the genre.

The translation is rather clunky (clumsy wording, shifts in tenses mid-sentence, once even a change of the sentence's subject that renders a whole paragraph nonsensical). But I forgive all that because of an accidental pentameter on page 110 (complete with rhyme): "The risen dead have no place to return ... and that is why they're sorrowful and stern." I also enjoyed the descriptions of unpredictable physics and weird artefacts inside the Zone, and shuddered at the various "accidents" and ways to die in there (that totally go with my "descriptions of war can never represent war" argument). All in all, I'm really glad to have read this book. Still, I think that Tarkovsky probably picked out some of the best bits for his adaptation STALKER.

I love this book and read it countless times. Now, I bought it again just to be able to have it in my library. The ideas are fresh regardless of how long has been since it was written. This is one of those science-fiction books that invite introspection into human soul and approach the subject of extraterrestrial contact from a completely different position. I think it is a must for any book lover!