Since it was written years before the disaster, the premise of the book itself has nothing to do with Chernobyl or nuclear power in general, but it's easy to see how the makers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. got onto the parallels between the two. In Roadside Picnic, the Zone is one of six areas on the surface of the Earth that were altered by a cosmic event decades before the events depicted in the book. The exact details of "the Visit" are left nebulous in the narrative, but they're believed to have been a brief visitation by extraterrestrial beings.

The Visit left the places where the aliens landed (or whatever they did; it's implied to have been weirder than just "flying saucers land and leaves again") permanently changed in strange and usually dangerous ways--weird gravitational and magnetic anomalies, deposits of bizarre substances that may or may not be alive and which are usually hideously dangerous to get involved with, strange perceptual and psychological effects. There's no obvious radiation or toxic change to the soil, water, or air, but people who go in there are changed by the experience, even if they manage to survive all the hazards and come back alive.

Speaking of alive, dead people buried in the cemetery that happened to fall within the Zone occasionally climb out of their graves and walk back to their homes, but they aren't "restored to life" as such. They're zombies, though not the dangerous kind. They don't attack people--don't even really seem to notice them. They just mindlessly go back home and wait. For what, no one knows.

In the aftermath of the Visit, the United Nations cordoned off the Zones and reserved them for accredited scientific observers. No one else is allowed in. Unfortunately, along with the anomalies and hazards, the Zone is also strewn with what are apparently alien artifacts, some of which have proven useful and therefore valuable, and a lucrative black market has arisen in such things. The people who illegally venture into the Zone to retrieve these items are called "stalkers". Sometimes stalkers go legit and join the scientists as the equivalent of wilderness guides, taking them into the Zone and showing them how to survive long enough to find things worth studying. Usually they just get killed in there.

I won't get into any of the actual events depicted in the book--everything I've discussed above is established fact years before the narrative itself begins. From that already-out-there starting point, things just get weirder from there.

Fun fact: Years before the games were made, the men who went into the basement of the Chernobyl NPP in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, trying to figure out where the hell the core went, called themselves "stalkers" in self-conscious reference to Roadside Picnic.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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