I recently finished reading “Roadside Picnic” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky for a book club I’m in. It’s a 1972 science fiction book about what happens after aliens briefly visit various places on Earth and then leave forever, rendering those areas totally corrupted, something like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, infested with alien hazards and littered with dangerous trinkets of advanced, unexplainable technology.
I liked this book a lot. I read it in six days, something like four or five sittings. It had me genuinely hooked at one point, turning pages for a good hour longer than I’d expected to when I sat down. One chapter is a bit of a stinker compared to the rest, shifting perspective to another character and introducing a lot of confusion for no real good reason, but otherwise it was an exciting, surprising, quick and easily recommendable read.
The way our book club works is we all submit books, put them on a wheel and spin it to decide which one we’re reading next. After five books, we arrived at mine — this one. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while, probably ever since I was a kid online, seeing it mentioned as the inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games and 1979 “Stalker” film by Andrei Tarkovsky. I knew about both of these growing up, but they always seemed a bit too hardcore for me. I’ve never played or watched either, but the games are a type of intense survival thing I don’t tend to like, and the movie always seems long and artsy and uninviting. Both are more enticing now that I’ve enjoyed their source material, however loosely based either of them actually are.
Here are some quotes I liked from the book.
As the protagonist, Redrick, looks through the treasures he brought back from the Zone, I thought it was uncanny how directly it seemed to prefigure the experience of sorting through loot in a video game. The original kernel for the modern extraction shooter genre must somehow lie in the story of Redrick as a “stalker” repeatedly entering the Zone for items to sell on the black market.
He put on a rubber apron, pulled on elbow-high rubber gloves, and started unloading the items in the bag onto the table. Two empties. A box of pins. Nine batteries. Three bracelets. And another hoop—resembling a bracelet but made from a white metal, lighter and about an inch larger in diameter. Sixteen black sparks in a plastic bag. Two perfectly preserved sponges close to a fist in size. Three shriekers. A jar of carbonated clay. There was still a heavy porcelain container, packed carefully in fiberglass, remaining in the bag, but Redrick left it alone. He took out his cigarettes and lit up, looking over the swag laid out on the table.
This passage had a dotted underline on it on my Kindle, indicating that a lot of people had highlighted it — I think the only such passage in the book:
The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.
Michigan mention! It came up in a description of the weird occurrences that happen when former residents of the Zone region move away, bringing the Zone’s weird curse with them. Appropriately, the Great Lakes geography is way off.
The son of a barber and the grandson of a barber. He moves to, say, Detroit. Opens a barbershop, and all hell breaks loose. … The heavens open, and Lake Ontario or Michigan, or wherever Detroit is, bursts its banks.
This description of entering the Zone really hooked me into the book during my first sitting with it:
The sidewalk’s getting closer and closer, there’s the shadow of the boot inching over the brambles . . . Here’s the Zone! And instantly a chill runs down my spine. I feel it every time, but I still don’t know whether it’s the Zone greeting me or a stalker’s nerves acting up. Every time I figure I’ll go back and ask others if they feel it too, and every time I forget.
These weird hauntings in the Zone were highlights:
Over the pile of ancient trash, over the colorful rags and broken glass, drifts a tremor, a vibration, just like the hot air above a tin roof at noon; it floats over the mound and continues, cuts across our path right beside a marker, lingers over the road, waits for half a second—or am I just imagining that?—and slithers into the field, over the bushes, over the rotten fences, toward the old car graveyard.
The houses in the Plague Quarter are peeling and lifeless, but the windows are mostly intact, only so dirty that they look opaque. Now at night when you crawl by, you can see the glow inside, as if alcohol were burning in bluish tongues. That’s the hell slime radiating from the basement. But mostly it looks like an ordinary neighborhood, with ordinary houses, nothing special about it except that there are no people around.
Redrick kept looking toward the road. It was now dark and he couldn’t see a thing, but that one was out there somewhere—marching like a windup toy, stumbling, falling, crashing into crosses, getting tangled in bushes. “All right,” Redrick said aloud. “Let’s go.”
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