Tarkovsky’s Stalker, then, feels like another story set in the same world, maybe surrounding a different Zone. (To this extent, he rather reminded me of Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker.) The modularity of this storytelling style all but begs other creators to borrow the same setting for their own ends. An expert stalker, Red makes his work a real pleasure to watch - even though he hates the Zone, and he hates himself for feeling more at home there than with his own family, even while it’s trying to kill him.
Having established this setting, Roadside Picnic tells several stories as vignettes from the life of ever-tragic protagonist Red. Stalkers refer to each other only by goofy callsign-style nicknames, and they’re all extremely miserable people. To wander into a Zone unprepared is suicide, and so a sub-culture has sprung up of “stalkers” - desperados who risk their lives and flout the law in order to raid the Zones, seeking loot to sell, and building up maps and codexes of routes and secrets and survival techniques. They left behind piles of refuse in the forms of miraculous artifacts of completely opaque purpose, and bizarre energy fields that warp local physics. The novel’s central conceit studs the world with lingering “Zones” that exist many years after a brief and ill-defined visit by never-seen space aliens. I loved its setting, which has surely inspired many more games and films than the two direct adaptations listed on the cover. While I seem to have lost my notes about Roadside Picnic, I do recall it as a fast and easy read. The idea to read it came to mind quite obliquely a couple of months ago, following a path including but not limited to my learning of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films via the video game The Witness earlier this this year.
video games”, read the front-cover copy of the recent edition of Roadside Picnic I read - a fresher translation from the Strugatsky brothers’ original Russian, apparently, than the one last published in the U.S. “The inspiration for the film Stalker and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
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