AFTERWORD
BY BORIS STRUGATSKY
The story of writing this novel (in contrast to the story of publishing it) doesn’t include anything amusing or even instructive. The novel was conceived in February 1970, when my brother and I got together in Komarovo, a Russian town on the Gulf of Finland, to write The Doomed City. At odd moments during evening strolls through the deserted, snow-covered streets of that tourist town, we thought of a number of new plots, including those of the future Space Mowgli and the future Roadside Picnic.
We kept a journal of our discussions, and the very first entry looks like this:
…A monkey and a tin can. Thirty years after the alien visit, the remains of the junk they left behind are at the center of quests and adventures, investigations and misfortunes. The growth of superstition, a department attempting to assume power through owning the junk, an organization seeking to destroy it (knowledge fallen from the sky is useless and pernicious; any discovery could only lead to evil applications). Prospectors revered as wizards. A decline in the stature of science. Abandoned ecosystems (an almost dead battery), reanimated corpses from a wide variety of time periods….
In these same notes, the confirmed and final title—Roadside Picnic—makes an appearance, but the concept of a “stalker” is nowhere to be seen; there are only “prospectors.” Almost a year later, in January 1971, again in Komarovo, we developed a very thorough and painstakingly detailed plan of the novel, but even in this plan, literally on the eve of the day we finally stopped coming up with the plot and started writing it, our drafts didn’t include the word “stalker.” Future stalkers were still called “trappers”: “trapper Redrick Schuhart,” “the trapper’s girlfriend Guta,” “the trapper’s little brother Sedwick.” Apparently, the term “stalker” came to us in the process of working on the first pages of the book. As for the “prospectors” and “trappers,” we didn’t like those terms to begin with; I remember this well.
We were the ones who introduced the English word “stalker” into the Russian language. Stalker—pronounced “stullker” in Russian—is one of the few words we “coined” that came into common use. Stalker spread far and wide, although I’d guess that this was mainly because of the 1979 film of that name, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and based on our book. But even Tarkovsky latched on to it for a reason—our word must really have turned out precise, resonant, and full of meaning. It would have been more correct to say “stawker” instead of “stullker,” but the thing is, we didn’t take it from a dictionary at all—we took it from one of Rudyard Kipling’s novels, the old prerevolutionary translation of which was called The Reckless Bunch (or something like that)—about rambunctious English schoolkids from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century and their ringleader, a crafty and mischievous kid nicknamed Stalky. In his tender years Arkady, while still a student at the Military Institute for Foreign Languages, received from me a copy of Kipling’s Stalky & Co. that I happened to pick up at a flea market; he read it, was delighted, and right then made a rough translation called Stullky and Company, which became one of the favorite books of my school and college years. So when we were thinking of the word “stalker,” we undoubtedly had in mind the streetwise Stullky, a tough and even ruthless youth, who, however, was by no means without a certain boyish chivalry and generosity. And at the time it didn’t even cross our minds that his name wasn’t Stullky at all, but was actually pronounced “stawky.”
Roadside Picnic was written without any delays or crises in just three stages. On January 19, 1971, we started the rough draft, and on November 3 of the same year we finished a good copy. In the interim we kept busy with a wide variety of (typically idiotic) pursuits—wrote complaints to the “Ruling Senate” (i.e., the secretariat of the Moscow Writers’ Organization), answered letters (which, sitting side by side, we did fairly rarely), composed a government application for a full-length popular-science film called The Meeting of Worlds (about contact with another intelligence), wrote three shorts for the popular Soviet television series Fitil (or something like it), thought of a plot for the TV movie They Chose Rybkin, worked out a first draft of the plot of the new novel Strange Doings at the Octopus Reef, and so on and so forth—there were no follow-ups or ultimate outcomes for any of these scribbles, and they have absolutely no relation to subsequent events.
Remarkably, the Picnic had a relatively easy passage through the Leningrad Avrora (a Soviet literary journal), not encountering substantial difficulties and sustaining damage only during the editing, and minor damage at that. Of course, the manuscript had to be purged of various “shits” and “bastards,” but these were all familiar trivialities, beloved by writers the world over; the authors didn’t retreat from a single principal position, and the magazine version appeared at the end of the summer of 1972, practically unscathed.
The saga of the Picnic at the publisher Young Guard (YG) was only beginning then. Actually, strictly speaking, it began in early 1971, when the Picnic didn’t yet exist on paper and the novel was only being offered in the broadest of terms in an application for an anthology. This putative anthology was called Unintended Meetings, was dedicated to the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence, and consisted of three novels, two finished—Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel and Space Mowgli—and one that was still being written.
Difficulties began immediately.
03/16/71—AS: …the higher-ups read the anthology, but are hemming and hawing and saying nothing definite. By their request, the anthology was given to a certain doctor of historical sciences (?) to review—on the grounds that he really likes science fiction…. Then the manuscript, along with this review, will come back to Avramenko [the assistant head editor] (probably to give her a chance to reevaluate the existing, but secret, assessment?), and after that will make its way to Osipov [the head editor], and only then will we be apprised of our fate. Bastards. Critics.