Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

[landingtree]

Regions of impossible physics have occurred on Earth, full of alien detritus that's deadly or valuable by turns. In daylight, government officials enter to brave the deadly and retrieve the valuable; at night, it's the turn of the stalkers, a new professional group of smuggler-ranger. The book's protagonist works both sides.

It's always interesting to see if the source material survives its offspring. I've met two things inspired by this book, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing and the Tarkovsky film of it. They're both to some degree faithful adaptations, and did they exhaust this book? Not at all! It's one of those novels I get to the end of and go, "How was there this much novel in only that many pages?"

The answer-

(structural spoilers commence)

-is that it moves through time at a much quicker clip than those other two works. The Tarkovsky film moves with the patience stalkers themselves require; the book doesn't. It knocks scenes, places, and characters into existence with one or two blows of the hammer each, fully confident in the integrity of the structure it's building.

One of the things that makes the Zones interesting is that it's so unclear whether they'll change everything or nothing. An opportunity appears and humans exploit it, do crimes with it, make it into batteries and maybe weapons too: close enough to what we were doing before that at times the job of stalker seems only a metaphor for any other kind of precarious getting-through-the-day. Also they're an existential threat of a never-before-seen kind that might change or obliterate the world in another half-hour.

The hypersignificance of each small detail in the Zone-navigating passages reminds me - and maybe it's just because a scene in the Tarkovsky film, which is working from further outside the characters' heads than the book is, had made me think this first - of a children's game. A small stretch of ground is doing a huge amount of work. Pebbles become threats to life and limb, and a twig becomes a road to safety. There's nothing really there, and what you're witnessing is a person moving very slowly, full of tension and patience, over a small, normal-looking stretch of ground. How often did I cross a stony creek as a child, pretending that my choice of stone was vitally important? That's part of the satisfaction of the Zone story for me: the skill-set of knowing a place's hidden rules. The book gives another, adult example of place-knowledge working: at one point the stalker protagonist escapes from police by applying his skills to a perfectly ordinary neighborhood he knows equally well.

There's an offhand misogyny to this book - the Zone itself is at one point described as a bitch - which I think is part of what Nova Swing is written about and against.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

I love the way Roadside Picnic has become an entire genre unto itself (M. John Harrison, Jeff Vandermeer), but most especially the way it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which is to say that according to the absolutely fascinating memoir Stalking the Atomic City (A Stroll to the Zone) (2015, English translation 2022), the Ukrainian Markiyan Kamysh makes it clear that the culture surrounding the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is-- self-consciously and intentionally-- modeled on Roadside Picnic and on Tarkovsky's Stalker. There are stalkers; they take tourists in and out, they scavenge for possibly-reusable metal and electronics, they have a weird ambivalent relationship with the authorities; they are mostly the people of the area, whose families were evacuated from the Exclusion Zone or who were not quite close enough to be moved, and they have fatalistically accepted that they are all probably going to die of cancer anyway, so why not. That this happened exactly where the novel and film are at home, are in the local language and reflect local sensibilities, is IMO one of the odder twists of micro-level history.

[rachelmanija]

Whoa, I had no idea it was intentionally modeled on Stalker/Roadside Picnic- I thought it was a bizarre coincidence.

[rushthatspeaks]

Oh, it is absolutely one hundred percent intentional, to the point where Kamysh muses about whether there is some way to get copies of the book and/or Tarkovsky movie to the similar community building up around Fukushima, or to see whether those people are already aware of the source texts, in order to try to build some kind of continuity to stalker culture worldwide.

[landingtree]

That is so odd and so apt. And our local library has the memoir - thank you!