Roadside Picnic

Today, I finished reading Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - translated by Olena Bormashenko (2012 edition).

As often is the case, I stumbled across it on Wikipedia, after researching about Stalker - the term commonly associated with people, who venture into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone illegally. Chernobyl itself is an interest of mine, having read 100s of articles, watched many documentaties and enjoyed (if that can be said) the HBO series.

Roadside Picnic was released in the 1970s, in Soviet Russia - after 8 years of attempts to get it published and being rejected, or heavily edited - to conform with the regime. It's a science fiction novel, depicting the aftermath of an alien visit to Earth - suggesting they had stopped by for a Roadside Picnic, leaving many artifacts behind. These artifacts were possibly their litter, but ended up being sought after and retrieved by these Stalkers - at great peril.

I'm not going to delve into the plot any further, but focus on the term "Stalker". Arkady and Boris were the first to introduce the word, into the Russian language - pronounced Stullker in Russian. They had planned Roadside Picnic over a number of years, but only chose the term "Stalker" as they started writing the first few pages.

It's the word "Stalker" that intrigued me and allowed me to read Roadside Picnic in the first place. Arkady and Boris themselves first coined the term, when at college - having read Rudyard Kipling's novel The Reckless Bunch. This was a story about a group of school kids in the late 1800s/early 1900s, who had a ringleader named Stalky. They likened some of Red's characteristics to Stalky - and it stuck.

After Roadside Picnic was finally published, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky latched onto the word for his 1979 film Stalker - itself influenced and loosely based on Roadside Picnic.

The spooky part, is that both Roadside Picnic and Stalker (1979) were almost a decade prior to the Chernobyl disaster of 26th April 1986. Yet, both the novel and film centre around the "Zone" - an exclusion area, heavily guarded, which very few are allowed inside. Both the novel and film enter the Zone, with a group of people being led by a Stalker. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 had an exclusion zone setup, initially at 10km around the nuclear power plant - later increasing to 30km. Russians, Ukranians, Belarusians and others, venture into the exclusion zone frequently. They call themselves Stalkers, often entering at night in darkness, so as to not be spotted by the police and armed patrols.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R the game was developed by a Ukranian team, who themselves took inspiration from both Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979). It puts you in control of a Stalker, venturing into the zone, seeking artifacts and meeting other like-minded Stalkers during your adventure.

I've played the game, watched the documentaries and 1979 film - and now have completed the book, from where it all began. I'm also mid-way through a few Chernobyl books, having completed Chernobyl Prayer last month.

It's not the fascination with "disaster tourism", or indeed the disaster itself. It's the way everything is intertwined - and how something intended to simply produce power, resulted in such catastrophe, which is still apparent today - nearly 40 years on. It is also the foreshadowing of a contaminated exclusion Zone, which Roadside Picnic first warns us of, in a mysterious science fiction way.

I highly recommend reading the book, as it's a great piece of science fiction writing itself, but also opens up to a whole culture, stemmed from this novel.