Roadside Picnic: Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky

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was hard for me to believe that this book was written years before the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station - an explosion that left a "Zone" full of deadly invisible poison affecting those in it or near it, with ghost city that once was full of people and now is just a shell of a disaster. Tarkovsky’s take on Roadside Picnic jettisons most of the book, though bits and pieces remain. There’s still a Stalker, though he’s quite different from Red, coming across as more of a religious zealot. There’s talk of various traps and hidden dangers in The Zone, including the famous Meat Grinder, but none of them are set off and the dangers remain psychological. The filmmaker essentially used the book as a skeleton and built his own story around it.

Moreover, is art not art to the people who create it, because they decide its outcome? That is a part of Ebert's argument. I, for one, look forward to a future where I can have more participation in the art I consume, and it's a desire creators recognize: I get 'alternate endings', re-imagined remakes, adaptations which take liberties from their inspiration. Arkady Strugatsky was born 25 August 1925 in Batumi; the family later moved to Leningrad. In January 1942, Arkady and his father were evacuated from the Siege of Leningrad, but Arkady was the only survivor in his train car; his father died upon reaching Vologda. Arkady was drafted into the Soviet army in 1943. He trained first at the artillery school in Aktyubinsk and later at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, from which he graduated in 1949 as an interpreter of English and Japanese. He worked as a teacher and interpreter for the military until 1955. In 1955, he began working as an editor and writer.

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People who have been exposed to the zones are often altered, and their children are born with strange mutations, despite there being no measurable radiation in the zones.

In the afterword Arkady has a list of all the letters and petitions that were exchanged between various Russian committees trying to get approval. ”Eight years. Fourteen letters to the ‘big’ and ‘little’ Central Committees. Two hundred degrading corrections of the text. An incalculable amount of nervous energy wasted on trivialities...Yes, the authors prevailed; there’s no arguing with that. Their name directly originates from Roadside Picnic. The renown of this SF book from the Soviet era is probably due, in part, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The film is loosely adapted (by the Strugatsky brothers, who took part in the screenplay) from the last section — and undoubtedly the best part — of their book. Red's adventures as a stalker spans eight years. As we learn toward the end of the novel, Red's journey is a hero's journey, involving what Joseph Campbell termed 'sacrifice and bliss.' To judge the truth of these words, I encourage you to read this classic for yourself - I guarantee you will not be disappointed.Bureaucrats and politicians, who can’t afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it’s all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government’s policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write.’