But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty”, something goes wrong. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. The Strugatsky brothers even wrote the screenplay for the movie. The book became a heavy influence on the 1979 film ‘ Stalker‘, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The somewhat surreal image on the jacket is in Adrian Chesterman’s classic art style of the late 70s and 80s – many of his book covers had a figurative focus, with a human (or creature) as the central anchor for the image, and his wonderful airbrush style always imparted an alien and unsettling atmosphere.įirst published in 1972, ‘ Roadside Picnic‘ is considered to be a classic work from brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Stalkers basically creep into these restricted areas and forage and scavange for these weird and unusual artifacts and treasures, and bring them out of the prohibited zones in order to sell them on the black market. Each of these zones exhibit strange phenonema and contain weird and wonderful artifacts not understood by humanity. In the novel, Stalkers are people who enter prohibited zones that have been established on Earth after an unseen alien visitation takes place. The book jacket is probably depicting the main character of the story ‘Redrick “Red” Schuhart’ who is a ‘stalker’.

‘ Roadside Picnic‘ by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, published in 1979 with book jacket art by Adrian Chesterman.Īdrian Chesterman is the artist behind this surreal book jacket.Ĭhesterman produced book jackets for scores of science fiction books during the 1970s and 1980s.

Stalker strugatsky