Pilman: Imagine a picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car drives off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out of the car carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Gas and oil spilled on the grass. Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around. Rags, burn out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind. Oil slicks on the pond. And of course, the usual mess — apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's penknife, torn newspapers, comic, faded flowers picked in another meadow.
Noonan: I see. A roadside picnic.
Pilman: Precisely. A roadside picnic, on some road in the cosmos.
- Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
The premise is very simple and it actually would fit the episodic nature of a TV series extremely well. Across the world (in a very specific and interesting pattern) certain 'Zones' appeared - the places where something known as a "Visitation' occurred. These were areas where the world changed drastically; they were touched by an alien presence - and everything changed and usually not in a good way. However with that strangeness came treasures - alien devices that did things. Fine - Witches Jelly melted your legs away. Witches Jelly melted anything to make more Witches Jelly. Then there were So-So, battery things that self replicated and there was the very rare and oddly aptly named Full Empty. So of course the governments where the Zone were quarantined them - they even started to send the people who lived in the Zones away. But the effects of the Zone followed you - one of the more disturbing effects was of a barber. Oh nothing happened to him, but when folks discovered that there was a 90% fatality rate among his customers, they quickly figured out that moving folks out was Not A Good Idea.
Thus the story revolves around Stalkers who dare the dangers of the Zones to bring out swag.
This is the way it is with the Zone: if you come back with swag -- it’s a miracle; if you come back alive -- it’s a success; if the patrol bullets miss you -- it’s a stroke of luck. And as for anything else -- that’s fate.
If this sounds somewhat familiar, transplant the site to Chernobyl and you got the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R
The reason it's a high-kill rate is that the 90% of what is in the Zone is fatal. The Zones are littered with bodies that serve as un-intentional landmarks, as in Go Here And You Die.
Redrick silently took him by the hair and turned his head in the direction of the bundle of rags on the stony hillside. "That was Four-eyes," he said. "And on the left hill, you can’t see from here, lies Poodle. In the same condition. Do you understand? Forward."
Now, on the literary side, Roadside Picnic is an engaging, edge of your seat and very smart read. The Strugatsky Brothers could write! I keep a copy at my desk
The translation by Antonina W. Bouis is **excellent** and does not feel stilted at all in any way. As Theodore Sturgeoun said "Russian I do not know, fiction I do; and I must honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion, character dimension, even conversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier."
Now, being a Russian novel and the Authors, sadly, passed away, Roadside Picnic is available in several locations on the net in PDF form.
On an interesting note, my copy of Roadside Picnic is paired with their Tale of the Trioka which is a very different and extremely wild ride - the only way I can describe it is a cross between Mobius'
Airtight Garage (of Jerry Cornelius) and Courtroom Scene from
Alice in Wonderland and Walt Kelly's
Suffern on the Steppes ... and not only is it no wonder that it was banned in Russia upon publication ... but in response they went back and wrote a 'director's version' where they took off the gloves and upped the sarcastic humor as only a pair of annoyed Russians could!
So yes over its history there have been many attempts to film it - there's Andrei's Tarkovsky's brilliant film "CTALKER" which roughly follows the books - it doesn't capture the action but it maintains the themes of the book and at least two American attempts that never got beyond "This would make a great film stage" - that there's a WGN pilot for a series (and filming has been done) this is really interesting.
