Kraven’s First Hunt

In this stagnant world, Two Brothers -

called Arkady and Boris Strugatsky -

became the inspiration

of a growing new dissident movement.

They weren't politicians,

they were science fiction writers,

and in their stories,

they expressed

the strange mood that was rising up

as The Soviet Empire collapsed.

Their most famous book

was called ‘Roadside Picnic’.

It is set in a world

that seems like The Present,

except there is A Zone that

has been created by an alien force.

People, known as "stalkers",

go into The Zone.

They find that nothing

is what it seems,

that reality changes

minute by minute.

Shadows go the wrong way.

There are hidden forces

that twist your body

and change the way

you think and feel.

The picture the Strugatskys gave

was of a world

where nothing was fixed.

Where reality - both what you saw

and what you believed -

had become shifting and unstable.

And in 1979, the film director

Andrei Tarkovsky

made a film that was based

on Roadside Picnic.

He called it Stalker.

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