Part of the reason that the Chernobyl STALKERs label themselves as such is because there is a series of cult classic videogames called STALKER that takes place 20 years after the first Chernobyl disaster. The games take inspiration from the book and move while ultimately doing its own thing.

@daniel5730

Күн бұрын

They could call themselves stalkers even before the games, urban exploration and Strugatsky's books were both big in post-soviet space so go figure.

I love your book and movie reviews 😍 I'll be looking out for this one!

@CateCrafter

Жыл бұрын

Omg thank you, that’s so nice of you to say 😊 I hope you enjoy the book and/or the movie

around 15:40, one thing I read on a subreddit somewhere is that Red knew the meatgrinder would go dormant after killing someone and that's why he took Arthur with him, so Red could pass to the sphere afterwards. And that's why he thinks Arthur is not going to comeback. Maybe even the vulture knew that as well when he refers him as "disposable"

That's my favourite book, I reread it every couple of years, thank you for the wonderful thoughtful review, subscribing ❤

@CateCrafter

18 күн бұрын

Omg thank you 🤩 I feel like I need to reread it soon

It's late and I'm too smooth brain to analyse this, but I really enjoyed this book and hearing your thoughts on it. I felt optimistic at the end, which was perhaps silly. But the end sort of..doesn't matter? I think the narrative frameworks within the book which allow philosophical discussions were all really engaging. The real ending was the friends we philosophised with on the way?

Can't wait to read this one! I've heard so many good things about it

@CateCrafter

Жыл бұрын

It was the same with me and luckily it lived up to the hype. Hope you enjoy it too when you get to it 😊

I just read this. I loved it, it definitely feels like a quite accurate portrait of the deeply disappointing way humanity would actually react in this situation. I love what Leguin says in the intro, that the censors didn't like them because they wrote like free men, not because of their politics (I went back and read it after I finished, I hate reading them beforehand too). Stalker has stuck with me for years, and I think the book will too. I'm not sure how I've not seen your channel before, the star trek reathon cracked me up!

@CateCrafter

9 ай бұрын

Yeah totally, like I want an alien encounter to be this massive life altering moment - in a good way but it would probs be so underwhelming in reality! Thanks for checking out my channel I really appreciate it and I had an absolute blast making the trek video 🖖

Awesome review. I just finished reading it--and honestly only read it due to a video game coming out in September, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, which was inspired by the book/movie. But I can say I absolutely loved it and thought it was incredible!

A friend and coworker (with whom I later fell out with) introduced me to Roadside Picnic in the 1980's and it just so happened a TV station played Stalker around the same time. It's odd that this should appear in my algorithms since I did not mention it out loud or write about, I just thought about it the other day. What I thought was, I genuinely found both pretty boring, but the underlying concept was interesting. The idea of a zone where the usual laws of reality and physics etc. don't apply is interesting. I also liked, in the book, which wasn't evident in the film, the way it was described that what was probably a UFO hit the Earth and rolled quite a way and its impact track was what created the zone. It reminded me of Philip K Dick's work too. Bizarre warped ways of looking at reality, surreal under the auspices of Science Fiction but really, all genres are just the way John Brunner described, the bifurcation of modern literature occurred; as a marketing tool. Oh well. That's my tuppenceworth.

@CateCrafter

8 ай бұрын

Ooh that’s kinda freaky that KZread read your mind 😂 Yeah I think most sci-fi makes a lasting impression with its ideas rather than characters or plot

My take on _Roadside Picnic_ , is more akin to _The Gods Must be Crazy_ . Either way, one of my top 'handful' of books.

I just watched the film last night, thanks for the recommendation. And thanks for Mosfilm for releasing it at such a low price. I bought the ebook a some years ago but got distracted before I finished it, so I'll take another look at that.

@CateCrafter

Жыл бұрын

Definitely recommend! I watched the movie first too and it just made me want to read the book even more. Hope you enjoy it 😊

One of the mistakes or erroneous interpretations about the novel and about the extraterrestrials is to assume that it talks about an extraterrestrial visitation, when in fact, it is only one of the most accepted theories by humans, but it is not the real one. That's why the movie starts with: "Was it a meteorite? an extraterrestrial visitation? an act of God? Whatever it was, in our small town appeared the miracle of miracles: the Zone. We sent troops that never came back. And we closed the place with a militarized cordon. We probably got it right, though I'm not sure." In other adaptations, whether they are other novels inspired by the original, short films, video games and other material, this point is better understood, and there is talk of multiple possibilities. The Zone exists in a state of being and not being, of existing and not existing. Like Schrödinger's Cat that is both alive and dead at the same time, the Zone is as much a design of God, a curse of the devil, a failed scientific experiment, a simple meteorite, as it is a visit from outer space. And none of these statements is incorrect, as correct. That's why in one part of the talk you mentioned, one of the characters, (I think it was Richard Noonan), says something like that the human being and science, tries to explain everything under its own analogy and scientific logic, when it is not superstition. They are not only talking about giving a blow to the human ego of believing themselves so important as to receive the extraterrestrial visit and have a contact, but also that they are facing an event that they cannot understand at all, that surpasses them by far, but even so, human psychology tries to reduce the experience to analogies and concepts that they can understand. NO ONE still alive (in the book) has seen the extraterrestrial visitors, so there are no (live) witnesses to an extraterrestrial landing, people just ASSUMED that there was one. And since there is no evidence of a landing or a visitation, no one knows if they really existed (or if they left). The existence of the Zone is only evidence of the existence of the Zone itself, but not of its specific origin.

Great review, i loved the book as well. Its interesting how the authors discuss the idea of wishes in their other books too, like in Hard to be a God, Rumata asks a cruel ugly backwards world what it would ask of a god

@CateCrafter

5 ай бұрын

I’m excited to read their other books and I probs will dive into Hard to be a God next

Love that book.

Roadside Picnic was my favorite book. I think The Doomed City has overtaken it as not only the Strugatsky brothers' best work, but my favorite book.

@CateCrafter

3 ай бұрын

Wow! I’ll have to check it out at some point!! 😊

oh i didnt expect you to have a nigel accent. anyway, good work and its my fav scifi book by far, so well written.

@CateCrafter

5 ай бұрын

Thanks for watching 😊

I love your plants

@CateCrafter

Ай бұрын

Thank you 🤩

Thanks for a very interesting and thoughtful review. If you fancy reading more books about the exploration of weird and dangerous alien zones on or near Earth, I would recommend Algis Budrys' 'Rogue Moon' (aka The Death Machine - content warning: it was published in 1960 so the gender politics may be problematical for modern readers), and Jeff VanderMeer's 'Annihilation' (2014, part 1 of the Southern Reach trilogy, filmed in 2018, directed by Alex Garland, though I think the book is better than the film).

@CateCrafter

8 ай бұрын

Thanks for the feedback and the recs. Though, I must admit I have read Annihilation and I preferred the movie 😬

Holy video cuts

Reading it rn I love it in on about page 80

@CateCrafter

2 ай бұрын

Yay, enjoy the journey!

@alfieogden

2 ай бұрын

@@CateCrafter finished it about a week ago I really enjoyed it but was confused by the ending

Our Insignificance ...the whole we are nothing...it makes Camus Absurdism sound just about right

@CateCrafter

9 ай бұрын

I’m not too familiar with Camus so I might have to do a bit of research into his philosophy of Absurdism 😊

It was set in Canada, but the details didn't make sense for Canada. The political structures and geography and the like all sounded like Russia... My understanding is that it was put in Canada in order to provide a fig leaf for criticism of the Soviet system. Much like the Doomed City, the location owes a lot to the Soviet system but canonically isn't... Same as Star Trek isn't America, *but*... My interpretation of the daughter has always been an analogy to PTSD. The Zone is either political activism & prison time in the Soviet system or military deployments in the US system... It's a thing you do even though it hurts you & hurts your family & doesn't positively impact anything you can see, but you do it because once you've done it-- it's all you can do. It becomes you, your fate, until it finally gets you in the end. But the suffering... The family takes the worst. I'd strongly disagree about it being a critique of capitalism. In practical terms, in communist systems, scavengers go in to get things to sell on the gray market. Grow vegetables on your dacha, sell what you steal from the factory, etc... that's why Chernobyl stalkers use that term. They all recognized that grey market system, everyone does it. You need the grey market to supplement what the State-authorized system can't provide. Especially in rural areas, away from the center. Which homo sovieticus understands, it resonates, then and now.

Didn't get to read the book, but from the movie I got that the "zone" is basically our mind/imagination. The pale colors used in the film in some scenes represent the wold as it is: bland, crude, dark, lonely, but in the zone (your mind) everything is colorful, but also dangerous, misleading, murky, as some of our thoughts, but we're free in there. I guess that explains why the Stalker loved going to the zone, to be free from the world.

@bravediomedes217

15 күн бұрын

Aside from using the words ‘zone’ and ‘stalker’, the movie has nothing to do with the book.

@daniel5730

Күн бұрын

@@bravediomedes217 Strugaskys actually cooperated with Tarkovsky and they wrote a script together. Legend has it they had to rewrite the thing three times.

Stalker's daughter in the film is actually called monkey. Maybe you missed it. Although yes she doesn't look like a monkey, she has no fur, but she is a mutant alright.

@CateCrafter

9 ай бұрын

Yeah indeed, because she moves the glass at the end of the movie but I was being quite literal in the fact that she was not morphing into a monkey.

Thanks for the interesting review. I wasn't impressed by the book. Nice read but without a proper plot.

@TokraRoch

Ай бұрын

You are one of the few, along with me, who didn’t like this book. Glad I read it, but really don’t understand the accolades it gets. Art is art, I guess. Not my cup of tea. 😊

Reading this now and about half way. I keep having to remind myself that this was the early 70s Russia when it was written because the treatment of women (sexualization and violence) is tough to deal with.

Critique of Capitalism? I guess you've never been to Cuba or other communist country. People in these countries have to do all sorts of side businesses in order to survive, like Red. Red (= communism) would feel at home in a communist country. It is not capitalism cashing in, but poor soviet citizens doing what they can to survive. You got it all wrong!

@CateCrafter

2 ай бұрын

I think it’s you that got it all wrong. The book is set in an English speaking country that’s most likely the USA as the fictional town is called Harmont which feels very American. The zones in Russia or the USSR are pretty much untouched.

@johneagle4384

2 ай бұрын

Exactly. But, the authors lived in the Soviet Union. And because of that, they could not openly criticize the Soviet State. That would guarantee a one way trip to a gulag somewhere in Siberia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is an example. openly

@CateCrafter

2 ай бұрын

Well, your still wrong 😂 Found this in an essay: Potts continues this topic of ardent Marxism with regard to Roadside Picnic: “gangsterism is closely tied to capitalism in Marxist thought; since both are geared to the accumulation of material wealth to the exclusion of other values, one is merely a form of the other. This connection is evident in the behavior of Red and his colleagues and contacts” (78); and, “Of all the works of the Strugatsky brothers, Roadside Picnic provides the strongest criticism of the capitalist ethic” (80).

@johneagle4384

2 ай бұрын

Well, everything depends on the political views of the author of the essay. If the guy is a Marxist, everything is seen through the rosy lens of Marxism, right? Nah....everything in Roadside Picnic exudes Soviet socialism. The constant drinking and the Borscht are Russian things. In chapter 4, I see a description of a place similar to, for example, Pripyat. Who dives Peugeots in the US? The constant swearing is not an American thing. I do not see a guy working in a lab talking and drinking like Red. The International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures would not (most probably) exist in the US. There is none of the exuberance of capitalism, only the dull reality of socialism, etc, etc, etc. I see Red as a poor alcoholic comrade (this is so Russian!) living in a communal apartment complex trying to eke out a living in the bleak conditions in the Soviet Union. Maybe the Strugatsky brothers wanted to write a critique of capitalism, who knows? But the end result is a description of the life a common citizen during Soviet totalitarianism.

@user-gr7wd4kg3e

14 күн бұрын

​@@CateCrafterRussians see it as set in a Soviet system, with a fig leaf of being in the capitalist world for the censors. Mostly because the Strugatskys were, after all, Soviet... They hadn't seen the West, didn't live there, didn't really care. Couldn't make their criticism bite, because it wasn't familiar enough to them. But the little compromises of living in the Soviet system, that they knew. Bribing doctors & bureaucrats, make-work jobs with supplies shunted to grey market activity, scavenging, kids labeled & their future damaged for their parents activity... Similar to Phillip K Dick, even when it's supposed to not be in southern California, it's in southern California. The critique of the system is the critique of the one tormenting the author (either the brothers or PKD), not really anything outside it. Doomed City or the Zone, it's what they saw around them that they were talking about.