Bottom left I like-but what it shows, a “full” empty, is boring, especially when you’re book’s about low-life, bad-asses yaddayaddayaddaing. Top right is the version I own and has a decent understated 70s SF bleakness about it. You can’t really be a badass while wearing a silver egghead suit. Stalkers are badass lowlives risking life and limb to sneak into a ruined factory in search of treasure. The top left screams it in all its ugliness. Now for four anglophone covers, which are kind of interesting because they show the way the book’s packaged differently for different audiences. They look like your standard post-apocalyptic SF, and the one on the bottom seems to advertise it’s link to the video game/movie (both are called Stalker), while the top cover makes me a bit nostalgic for the crappy bookcovers of 1980s SF. I don’t know if these copies are Russian or Polish. It was the basis of a Tarkovsky flick and a video game and you can make world parallels to Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, and the Varosha area in Famagusta.Īnyway on to the covers–we’ll start with the non-anglophone ones since the book was first published in Russia. A thriving black market in alien artifacts exists fed by adventurers, such as Red Schuhart and others, who risk their lives exploring the Zone. The area around the Zone is thick with operatives from various multinational companies and world governments. This area’s now called the Zone, and it’s heavily guarded and contained, but deserted. These aliens are gone, but they or their technologically advanced artifacts have altered a section of the city. I was doing this last week while waiting for some other books to arrive.įor folks who haven’t read it, Roadside Picnic is an SF novel that takes place in a city after an alien visitation. I can pick it up, read a bit, at least any of the Red Schuhart sections, then put it down for months on end. The Strugatsky Brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic is one of those books I read when I can’t find anything else to read.
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