Roadside Picnic
Roadside Picnic (1972)
by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
145 pages - Gollancz SF Masterworks

At five spots on the earth, an alien 'Visitation' occurs, and the areas undergo a sort of disaster. The aliens, if that's what they are, soon depart, but leave many of their artifacts and other strange phenomena behind. These become Zones forbidden to the regular population, where scientists tentatively explore, and black-market opportunists known as Stalkers trespass in order to bring out artifacts to sell.

The novel focuses on a Zone in Canada, and specifically on a stalker named Redrick Schuhart, who over the years works both officially and illegally in the Zone, and interacts with other stalkers, businessmen, and government officials. He also gets married and has a mutant daughter, as all the children of people who spend time in the Zone produce mutant children.

This novel was the basis for the excellent film Stalker, and after having finished reading it, I am sorry to say that it doesn't quite measure up to the film version. I guess it's true what they say, that great books often make mediocre movies, but mediocre books can make great movies. The novel was still pretty good, but I think it really went downhill in the last section (about the last 40 pages), a point at which I had assumed it would get even better. The book is also mostly written in an almost hard-boiled style, where the characters are often snarling at each other, and either punching other people or thinking about doing so -- a bit of a contrast with both the film and most written SF. I also found myself waiting for moments that turned out to only be in the film. For example, much of the story centres around a rumoured artifact deep in the Zone that is able to make your deepest, truest wish come true. I was waiting for the moment when the book would tell the story of the man who wished for his dead brother to return, but when he came out of the Zone only found himself immensely rich; unfortunately, I realized at the end that this neat story was only in the film.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this novel (and the film based on it) is how much it has bled over into real life. Though both were made before the Chernobyl disaster, the forbidden area around that real-life disaster is known as the Zone of Alienation, which is colloquially referred to as 'The Zone', and many of the scientists that do work there have been known to call themselves stalkers. The Zone of Alienation is really fascinating, as it's both a nuclear disaster area and a large area of the modern world that has been almost entirely given back to nature, and you can find many interesting travelogues of the area online, like this one here.

It's a pretty interesting book, but it doesn't really wrap up the story in a satisfying fashion. I do highly recommend the 1979 Tarkovsky film Stalker. The title of the novel comes from the idea that the alien artifacts left behind are like things people leave behind after a roadside picnic; afterwards the animals come around and poke about and maybe get some benefit and some harm, but no real understanding occurs.