I think the meaning of book Roadside Picnic, and both the film version of Stalker and the video games are that the Wish Granter has already been used before the story begins. The characters all live in a world created when somebody else's wish was granted. It warped reality and created a Zone of alienation, and things that persist from the reality before the wish was granted appear to the characters as mysterious artifacts.But of course the Strugatskys lived in the Soviet Union which itself is a Zone of alienation created when the wish of Marx (or at least Lenin) was granted. The people trapped inside the "Zone" or behind the Berlin wall live under the thumb of the Soviet state, a project of the revolutionary ideas that came out of the enlightenment. They exist simply for their minds and bodies to be the conduits for their rulers to manifest the Soviet idea in the world. It can only exist if they play along with the delusion that man can invent his own society that doesn't adhere to natural laws, but proclaims its own law determined by (what they believe to be) human reason. The "Zone" (what the one in the story is an allusion to) is mental prison that only exists if the people inside act as if it's real. The author cannot directly acknowledge this, so he sets the story of Roadside Picnic in Canada. But even in doing so, he points out that North America is another secular humanist society- an alternate Zone where a different wish was granted. One can't look at the US Founding Fathers and the British Puritans without realizing they were trying to transform the world in their image. The stalkers, in real life all the people who died living on the frontier, fighting the natives, got worked to death building the railroads, etc were the human sacrifice needed for the wish granter to work. In the Soviet case, it was all the people who fought in WW2 or died in the Gulag. If something anomalous just appears and kills you for a reason you can't understand, you're probably in a Zone.In Roadside Picnic, Red has to sacrifice someone to make the way to the wish granter clear. But this is meaningless because he's not the kind of person with a grand wish to transform the world. He's actually one of the people likely to be sacrificed. So he doesn't know what to wish for, and this story is like an inversion of the Promethian myth. It's as if your foot made it all the way to your head and and tried to take control of the whole body, only to realize it doesn't have enough brain to know what to do. Does any of this sound right?
>>25258728I think you’re abusing the story in a way that makes it less interesting like finding out Cthulhu was just grumpy about immigration and it was all an allegory for mental health services. If you want to read something political by the same authors pick up Hard To Be A God which got them into trouble with the commies.
>>25258728I like this.
>>25258728>Does any of this sound right?You are overthinking a very simple and straightforward science fiction story.
>>25258765>>25258985>stop thinking so much, tovarich. Especially on Karl Marx Day
>>25258765>which got them into troubleI fucking hate how Strugatskies constantly tried to portray themselves as some sort of oppressed dissidents, despite being the integral part of official soviet literary nomenklatura, boohoo you had to consult your shitty state sanctioned book with the state before it was published in hundreds of thousands exemplars, and was given moldovan wine instead of italian in spetsraspredelitel, cry me a river. People who got into trouble with soviet regime lie in unmarked mass graves.
>>25258728I actually thought the ending and the wish was an uplifting one? The person who was an idealist and wanted to wish for happiness for everyone died but when the time came for the main character to make the wish he wished for just that: happiness for everyone with no one left behind. In the ruins of everything, stuck in an awful life situation the MC still transcended a myopic/selfish dream and chose to ask for the salvation of humanity.
>>25258728What's the point of twisting and torturing it for this? You're just making the story very unengaging. >>25259076I mean, he really wanted to kill the boy to make his own kid normal.
>>25258765>>25258985Isn't all science fiction, fantasy, and horror just a delivery method for ideas that mainstream audiences who aren't ready to encounter directly can be introduced to / persuaded to accept through allegory? How can any author write something outside of their own experience? I think if you're an author with a certain kind of mind and lived through Soviet times, you'd be bound to write something like this. Even if you wanted to, I don't think anybody can create a fictional world that isn't a reflection of their own opinions and experiences.>>25259210Does this make the story less engaging? I think its interesting to try to figure out what the implicit worldview and opinions were of somebody who can't say it directly. Reading between the lines is sometimes more engaging than taking the story at face value.Red wanting to wish to save his daughter initially is interesting if my theory is correct, because it means that once a wish is made that twists the world, somebody else has to make another wish to try to un-twist the damage caused.Look at the 2018 movie Annihilation, which is basically another adaptation of Roadside Picnic, except made by Americans in modern times. The whole movie is about an anomalous Zone which can break all the rules of nature and warp people's DNA. Though it's not a wish granter, it still maps onto the wish of the filmmakers, producers, and Hollywood insiders to break the bounds of nature, splice the human body, and imagine an alien force that can make its own reality. But unlike Roadside Picnic and Stalker, the implicit message from Annihilation (that I took away anyways) is that the filmmakers think the Zone is a good thing and that humanity needs to be annihilated to make room for some evolved form of life. To me this obviously shows what they believe in, and the outline they took from Roadside Picnic all bends to fit that message.If you remember the 2001 movie AI by Spielburg, the aliens at the end who can make any reality they want are essentially the same as the alien from this film. Strangely, they act as wish granters for the wish of the robot boy.
>>25258728Sounds similar to Adam Curtis' take on the book in HyperNormalisation.
>>25258765>>25258985>>25259210>literary analysis is BAD
STALKER is dogshit.
>>25258728No, you're overthinking it.Strugatskie had gone a really interesting way of writing beginning from books, that had honest faith in good society of Soviet way (those books are about brave spacemen heroically and selflessly dying on frontiers of new planets for the idea of advancing the society in general - and are also very boring) through experience and understanding into philosophical works and bitterness about the actual state of everything - "Piknik na obochine" being something in-between. Mid to late Strugatskie are not sci-fi writers, they are much closer to Lem and Pelevin.I'd rather recommend you to read "Otyagoschyonnye zlom", "Grad obrechyonniy", "Hromaya sudba" and "Bessilnye mira sego".
>>25260522Which ideas that mainstream audiences aren't ready for are being propagated by Brandon Sanderson's books?
