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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.
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.
