We discover that Guta has given birth to a healthy but unspeaking and hair-covered child, known as ‘monkey’. Red drags him out of the zone, saving his life. In part 2, Red undertakes a new trip into the zone with a man called Burbridge, known as ‘The Vulture’, who loses his legs to a corrosive gunk called ‘hell slime’. His girlfriend Guta is pregnant but, despite the danger of mutation and deformity involved in carrying a Stalker’s child she resolves to have the baby. One such trip leads to the death of his friend, which causes Red much grief and gets him into trouble with the police. In the first section of Roadside Picnic Redrick ‘Red’ Schuhart, an experienced, wordly-wise young stalker, repeatedly enters ‘the Zone’ in search of such artefacts. A group of people known as ‘stalkers’ risk the zone to try and retrieve this last type, for money. The zones, though, contain many artefacts, some deadly, some useless, but some very valuable as advanced technology.
Strange ‘zones’ have appeared around the world, apparently after an alien visitation, inside which conditions are dangerous and often fatal for humans.
If you only know the Tarkovsky movie, the specificites of the original novel may surprise you. It is likely we will never know for sure. It has been published as by both brothers, although there are theories (according to the introduction by Leningrad SF author Lev Knyazhinsky) that Boris drafted it alone after Arkady’s death, either by himself or else working from a plan the two brothers had sketched back in the 1980s. Arkady died in 1991 and his brother Boris in 2012, which means that the appearance of this posthumously published sequel has caught everyone by surprise. It is certainly, by some margin, the brothers’ best-selling and most widely translated novel: there are, it seems, some 60 editions of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries. The Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972) - made into the 1979 movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky - is surely the most famous of the Soviet duo’s many SF novels.
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