Infinite Scroll is a series about the increasingly blurry lines between the internet, pop culture, and the real world.
The Zone, no matter how you enter it, is a pain in the ass. Sometimes it’s full of mutant animals, speaking in strangely familiar tongues. Sometimes there are gravitational anomalies, flinging you and whoever you’re with into the sky like ragdolls. Sometimes you stand in the ruins of a factory and head straight in one direction and stumble right back into the ruins you left. Sometimes there is a passage so unfriendly to visitors that it is simply called the Meat Grinder; perhaps your Destination, the very reason you entered the Zone, exists on the other side of said Meat Grinder. The point of the Zone is that these things are there, these absolutely glorious metaphysical pains in the ass, and that you are dealing with them, step by tremulous step. No matter what, there will be others like you—scavengers in search of god knows what. Maybe they, and you, will be called Stalkers.
That’s how most of us came to know the Zone. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker sits high in the pantheon of great art-house science fiction, transforming Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic into a characteristically heady and gorgeous meditation on the director’s pet themes: art, hope, fear, water, death, and so on. Tarkovsky claimed that he had only taken the words “Stalker” and “Zone” from the book, but the truth is that they have a lot in common. For example, in both, the Stalker is in search of some sort of wish-granting device deep within the Zone. In both, he has a daughter named Monkey, which makes a little more sense in the book (she appears to be turning into a monkey) than in the movie (she has no legs). The differences are largely ambient. The Strugatskys’ book features lots of pulply shit-talk, particularly among the various bureaucrats and hucksters etching a living off the Zone. The Zone, too, is a little less mysterious in the novel, described fairly clearly as the byproduct of some sort of superintelligence passing through the earth. The humans swarming it are compared to ants crawling over the leftovers of a roadside picnic—inconsequential, ill-equipped, and hungry.
But Tarkovsky’s claim is correct, at least in essence: the lure itself is the idea of the Zone, a cordoned-off area in which the basic laws of reality seem to be warped, and not by any coherent logic, thanks to some mysterious catastrophe. One consistent outgrowth of these time-space distortions is the production of artifacts with otherworldly properties, so valuable to outsiders that opportunistic Stalkers would willingly enter this nightmare. (The Strugatskys fill it with something called, righteously, Hell Slime.) Artists, too, keep re-entering the Zone; Tarkovsky’s interpretation of the Strugatskys’ initial vision would turn out to be just the first of many. As an idea, a meme in the classical sense, it is plague-like—resilient, mutating, dangerous.
Part of the reason for this is that, in 1986, the Zone came to terrible life: bursting out of the nuclear reactors in Chernobyl and manifesting in an actual 30-kilometer exclusion zone. Watching HBO’s gut-wrenching miniseries earlier this year, it was difficult not to think of the Strugatskys’ descriptions of invisible, flesh-melting anomalies, or of Tarkovsky’s imagery of scavengers spelunking through a post-industrial nightmare. In Stalker, there is a mysterious dog, seemingly at home within the Zone; in HBO’s miniseries, there are dogs, dozens of them, sliding out of a dump truck into a mass grave. These similarities are not lost on the young men who, to this day, lead curious visitors illegally through the exclusion zone. They call themselves Stalkers.
That Stalker, Roadside Picnic, and the Chernobyl disaster are all products of the late Soviet Union is no coincidence. The connection was made more explicit still in a trilogy of genre-defying games from the mid-2000s, each called S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which situate the Zone explicitly in the shadow of Chernobyl. (The first game in the series is subtitled, tellingly, Shadow Of Chernobyl.) Equal parts shooter, survival horror, and role-playing game, they tap into the explicitly game-like elements of the original idea: that is, of a knowing, singular avatar traversing an unknown space. What could be more game-like? The alpha-male bravado of Strugatskys’ original protagonist comes to the fore in the games; you spend time picking over corpses for loot, gaining the uneasy trust of fellow Stalkers, cooling your heels in melancholy bars. There have been many Zones since in games: the Metro trilogy imagines an entire society formed in the tunnels beneath an uninhabitable Zone, while this year’s Mutant: Year Zero re-configures the entire world as the Zone, with a single oasis of stalkers making occasional forays out into it. This feels a bit like a stretch of the definition of a “zone,” but on the other hand, you get to play as a talking duck in it. It’s very good.
There are many more transformations. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. clones are almost a game genre unto themselves, and Jeff Vandermeer’s recent Southern Reach trilogy of books, the first of which was adapted by Alex Garland as Annihilation, explored the idea of the Zone—here referred to as “The Shimmer”—reverently while also playfully subverting it. (Vandermeer, for example, is the first to send a group of women into the Zone.) What is it about this specific idea—the Stalker and the Zone—that has proven so robust? Part of it, certainly, is the narrative blank check it provides creators. It’s an elemental journey: man versus zone, if not quite man versus nature. You don’t need to explain anything; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. All Zone fiction is full of portentous exchanges in which one character simply… wonders. “It wasn’t destroying anything,” Natalie Portman says toward the end of Annihilation. “It was making everything new.” The scientist questioning her about her experience within The Shimmer pauses, then asks her: making what new? “I don’t know,” she responds. This is where you end the scene, in Zone fiction. No one ever knows.
It works, though—pretty much all of it; all Zone fiction is cool—because of the way the creators cash those blank checks. None of these works is particularly easy to get through, whether because they are directed by Andrei Tarkovsky or because, as in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, dialing down the difficulty merely makes every bullet in the game, including your own, do less damage. You shrug all of this off, though, because the Zone, no matter how you enter it, is supposed to be a pain in the ass. The fewer answers the better. It is a place of instability. Garland, for example, intentionally adapted Vandermeer’s novel from his mere impressions and memories. Its changes feel less like the shifts and compromises standard in book-to-film adaptations than they do a reordering by the rules of the Zone, as if Vandermeer’s lighthouse and zombie bear and alien spores rearranged themselves on this entry. The ruined landscapes of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are still patrolled by role-players lured to their rusty megastructures and demonic pulses of red light. All sci-fi allows its creator a certain aesthetic free reign, but the Zone focuses it on a certain melancholy stretch of the subconscious mind. It’s proven alchemical; with each new adaptation, it transforms again, the pieces moving into new positions. It’s hard to grow tired of a place that’s impossible to map.
What remains static, then, is the trinity: the Stalker, the Zone, and the Destination, although that last one can get a little shaky. Everybody enters the Zone for their own reason, even if that only becomes clear after the metaphysical anomalies hit the fan. In Stalker, the writer pulls out a gun, then the professor pulls out a bomb. Neither go off. In Roadside Picnic, the Stalker takes the son of his deceased friend as an unwitting offering to feed the Meat Grinder, in hopes of securing his own desires. In Annihilation, the women are in search of a lighthouse for reasons they never quite grasp—in addition to the titular oblivion. In the games, your mission is whichever one you’re following on the map. The quests are ever-changing; the constant is that there is a quest, whatever it is. So the Stalker stalks toward it. In almost none of these stories do they reach their Destination, or find precisely what they’re looking for. Tidy resolutions are as unlikely in the Zone as proper names. It’s always “the biologist,” “the writer,” “Porcupine”: something procedurally generated, the Zone swallowing steady narrative footing and stretching the destination further away.
For the documentarian Adam Curtis, this sense of ontological drift is not only the unifying aesthetic effect of Zone fiction, but its actual, real-world impetus. His sprawling 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation returns Roadside Picnic and Stalker to their points of origin, when the Soviet economy had collapsed but politicians refused to acknowledge it. He paraphrases the theorist Alexei Yurchak: “You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.” (The film was released just before that year’s U.S. presidential election, but written about everywhere just afterwards.) The Zone, like many great sci-fi ideas before it, transforms a real-world feeling into a hypothetical space, turning political and economic disenfranchisement amidst mass disinformation campaigns into a ruined wasteland full of space-time anomalies. The best one can hope for, like any of these Stalkers, is to make it from one solid spot to the next, tossing screws to verify the footing. Curtis loops back to Stalker later in the film, saying the political technologists behind the rise of Vladimir Putin had been “powerfully influenced by the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers.” But rather than further its original countercultural message, he says, “they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale. For them, reality was just something that can be manipulated and shaped into anything you want it to be.” This sort of citations-needed leap is common in Curtis’ documentary, but the rhetorical sweep is such that you barely notice it. What he is describing is a feeling that you can fact-check by reaching into your pocket.
Indeed, while Curtis’ political read is no doubt [Scrolls through Twitter, breathes into a bag for five minutes, returns.] accurate, it’s hard not to feel the Zone as a simulacrum for the internet itself in these late days of humanity: an increasingly cursed realm through which we willingly stalk, despite our certain knowledge of its very unreality. We know that, say, our Facebook friends are not our real friends, that “Like” doesn’t mean like, that an Instagram vacation doesn’t reflect the vacation had, that any video we see might be an algorithmic fake, that news sources have been bled free of their staff, and that the few fact-checkers left alive have become the last scattered acolytes of a dying cult. (If there was ever a metaphor from the depths of the Zone itself, it is the “bottomless Pinocchio.”) And yet, here we are—still! One of the most horrifying parts of 2016, the year Curtis released HyperNormalisation, was the way the internet’s id seemed to be crawling out into the real world, a phenomenon that has only increased, become more normal. Toward the end of Roadside Picnic, corpses start doddering out of the Zone, welcomed back into their old homes despite the godawful stench they give off. Think of this the next time you bump into an old friend who appears to be getting their politics from a YouTube algorithm.
Zone fiction can, at times, feel like a dark twin to the simulation-theory fiction that has proven so resilient since the dawn of the millennium. Both turn to sci-fi to explain the fundamental sense that reality has broken. But where simulation-theory stories almost always end in triumph, or at least acceptance—Neo breaking out of the Matrix, Truman leaving the studio, Cobb walking away from the top—Zone fiction ends in, well, annihilation. For Roadside Picnic, it’s a howl into gale-force winds; in Stalker, it’s spiritual desolation; in Annihilation, it’s turning into a dolphin, among other things. The Zone chews up narrative, often literally. The works themselves can seem cursed. Recent editions of Roadside Picnic end with an afterword in which Boris Strugatsky details the years-long censorship gauntlet the book survived to be published. The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game spent the better part of a decade in development hell, and was ultimately released full of bugs, anomalies born out of its own troubled production. An enumerated sequel has been in the works for almost a decade. Tarkovsky lost half of his film when it was developed improperly, then re-shot it all. The film’s sound designer has speculated that the eerily similar deaths by lung cancer of the movie’s star, as well as Tarkovsky and, later, his wife, were the result of its toxic filming locations. This theory is impossible to fact check, but it feels right. It is repeated everywhere on the internet.
102 Comments
The cool thing about Area X(the name of The Shimmer in the book series) is that, if you pay attention, it’s entirely explained by the end of the series. Also it doesn’t even really matter because the story is about the characters and not Area X.
I absolutely hated these books so if you can enlighten me? I mean I remember it was some kind of extraterrestrial thing, creating maybe a portal to another planet or something. I don’t remember and as I said really hated these books.
Not a portal, an ET terraforming machine. The ET environment was completely screwy compared to Earth’s though.Vandermeer’s writing is definitely not for everyone:)
What’s weird is I assumed that’s what was happening when I started reading Annihilation to the point that I just assumed it’s a theory someone threw out at some point early in the novel.
I believe that they give you the pieces to figure out the ‘poem’ really early in the books. But they never really confirm it, and just pile on so many other things worth questioning that even the easy answers become difficult to hold to with confidence.
It’s explained in a later book, not in the poem.
Not surprised to hear I got that a little wrong, those books get a little weird and hard to pin down where exactly certain facts come out. The third book is one of the few times in media I’ve experienced where an event happens and I actually understand it less after it’s played out.What I recall is that the ‘known facts’ of the poem are laid out reasonably early in Annihilation, and you learn just enough more over that book that you can get reasonably close to answering the question of ‘what even is that poem’. You have more of those facts confirmed later on, but the first book gives you all the pieces to get there on your own….and then the whole trilogy gives you a whole lot of other pieces of entirely different puzzles on top of that, and by the end you’re second-guessing if you understand a lot of it, or if some of it even matters.
It took me a few readthroughs to pick it all up honestly.
Ha nice!I think it’s vaguely described sometime in the third book.
I did not interpret it as terraforming so much as an attempt at communication from an intelligence so alien that communication is not actually possible. We can’t describe it because to do so drives us insane (witness the events in Florida when first contact is made). And of course, what can’t be described is not described. This is what many people did not like about the books, but I loved it. I’m not entirely sure the alien intelligence meant to wipe us out, but so it goes with first contacts.
There’s a section in I believe the third book that explains the origin of the flower of light that ‘infects’ Saul and then the entire region as being from an alien world that was destroyed by comets/asteroids and sent out pieces of itself all over the universe. Those pieces are programmed to reproduce the original environment.So basically von Neumann terraformers.
Dude. For each their own. But I loved those books.
Were the books worse than the awful film they were adapted to?
The books are, in my opinion, unimaginably better. The movie wasn’t even truly adapted from them; Alex Garland openly admitted to not even reading the book while making the movie. There’s a huge strength in doing that sort of story in literature rather than a visual medium, the ability to choose what you do and don’t describe, which does so much to make the feeling of that trilogy work. Seeing different people recounting the same (or similar) events and objects from different times and perspectives, the ability to just not mention or understate things that would be on the ‘screen’. Of course, the ability to just leave certain things to the imagination rather than explicitly giving it form.The Southern Reach trilogy’s strengths are all in the things that you can’t do in a visual medium—which I guess is why Garland didn’t even bother. It’s so good that I’ve realized I actually hate seeing people use the movie’s phrasing and elements to describe things rather than the book’s (which also happens in this article, funnily enough); ‘the Shimmer’ instead of ‘Area X’, a bear rather than a boar. Stop referring to the worse version, it’s much more worthwhile to call attention to the book!
That does sound much better. The movie’s greatest failure was the dated looking visual effects, but the pacing and tone were also way off balance. Sounds like the books might solve both of those issues. I’ll check out the first of the series.
In Garland’s defense, he only worked off the manuscript from the first novel. He never had the whole trilogy available to him. The book and film are openly very different beasts from one another. For what it’s worth, Vandermeer was very happy with the movie and particularly loves the movie ending.
Alex Garland openly admitted to not even reading the book while making the movie.He read the book (only Annihilation). He said he developed the screenplay from recalling his interpretation. Which, obviously, diverges from the book/series.Also, the film is about depression juxtaposed against an “alien virus.”
“The Shimmer”, being the physical manifestation of depression, that “many people have gone into and few come back from.” (paraphrasing a line from the film)
Every character was dealing with an issue…Ventress: Cancer. Sheppard: Bereavement of her child. Josie: Cuts herself. Anya: Drugs/alcohol. Lena: Infidelity. Ventress: “Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… and a happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses.”Ventress: “I don’t know what it wants, or if it wants, but it’ll grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains.” (Annihilation…Ventress loses the fight)Josie: “Ventress wants to face it. You want to fight it. But I don’t think I want either of those things.” (Josie simply accepts it as a part of her)
Josie (after Sheppard is mauled and the Bear has her scream): “Imagine dying frightened and in pain and having that as the only part of you which survives.”
Kane: “I thought I was a man.”
The movie was worse but it adapted the best book. The other books were boring and incoherent.
The only part I don’t get is the whole “strangling fruit” thing. The poem. What was the deal with the poem?
*MAJOR SPOILERS*The creature in the ‘Tower’ was what became of Saul after Area X engulfed the region. It’s rather up to interpretation but I believe the poem was Saul’s religious background expressing itself through the twisted nature of the Area X terraforming.Edit: If anyone else wants to jump in with other theories I’d be happy to hear them.
I want to read those books again. So good. What other Vandermeer would you suggest I read?
They definitely reward rereading.I’d recommend the novel Borne and the follow up The Strange Bird, they’re both awesome in pretty much the same way as Annihilation. Plus there’s another book set in that universe coming out in early December called Dead Astronauts. The sci fi and fantasy collections that he and his wife have done are really good too.
Can I suggest something that might also appeal, but isn’t by Jeff?There’s a book called “The Gone-Away World” by Nick Harkaway that’s a personal favourite of mine, but which is better the less you know about it going in.I tend to describe it as Adrian Mole – meets Mad Max – meets The Matrix.But that’s a terrible description really.
I just made another post this morning because I thought of The Gone-Away World last night, it fits right in with this theme except ‘The Zone’ is basically everywhere except where the Pipe spreads FOX.
Very cool book!
Ooh, I like that. I knew that Saul was in (or had just become) the lighthouse, but it didn’t occur to me that he was subconsciously algae-sketching new age poetry across the area. That makes sense (as much as anything in Area X, anyway). I dig it and will proceed from here as though it is fact. Well played.
That’s always been my interpretation of it. A man (or what’s left of him), changed almost beyond recognition, instinctively, possibly even involuntarily, trying to communicate in human language an awareness that doesn’t properly translate into the human spectrum. Fun stuff.
I’d say that was pretty much my take as well.And, while we’re at the spoilers . . . because someone else asked . . . What I got from the books was that once you went through the barrier and into Area X, you were literally ON ANOTHER PLANET. The stars were not those visible from Earth. No explanation about how or why, though.
Stalker is so good. The game, when it works, is also good.
Love this idea. The Zone is trully the last frontier, the place we can’t domesticate, yet we can’t stop going in there. It is the last reduct of a mighty nature we can’t beat.In the end, our human race has its limits, and it would be better if, finally, the Zone covers the rest of the world and terminate our species.
It does seem to be a common SF device. The most recent example I’ve encountered was the Kefahuchi Tract in “Light” (MJ Harrison).
That was a great series. I should re-read it. Thanks for the reminder!
Light is one of the best scifi books I’ve read. It’s truly stunning.
I think this one would count, too.
An even more direct example of a Zone in the sense of this article is in the sequel, Nova Swing, where a piece of the Tract crashes into a planet. The K-Tract itself is only interacted with directly by one or two characters in the novels, while the part that impacts the planet is a regular destination for adventurers. I`d also say that Area X/the Shimmer are more, uh, Lovecraftian than Harrison`s creations, which have a more Modernist/Dada flair to them. Both are great, but I have an enormous weakness for Harrison`s books, which I think are in the very highest tier of 21st century SF.
Nova Swing’s representation of the KT is more “zoney” but I much preferred Light as a novel.
I definitely agree that Light was the better of the two, but Nova Swing has a lot of stuff going for it, as I realized on a reread. I would also say the finishing book in the setting is quite nearly as good as Light. The setting, the writing and the themes in play for the trilogy are all at least good, edging into actual great with regularity, and it`s a shame that it isn`t as widely read as it ought to be.
I was ultimately annoyed by Nova Swing and never bothered with Empty Space. In fact my dissatisfaction with Nova Swing made me realize that the main reason I liked Light was amazement that Harrison made me care about mostly (2/3!) unpleasant protagonists. I don’t take your endorsement Lightly (*cough*), however, and will reconsider Empty Space.
I think there’s definitely some odd overtones to Nova Swing, but I thought the pseudo-noir elements were really well integrated into the story and the threads from the previous book were carried in a way that made it feel like a very organic setting. I can see where you’re coming from- everyone except for Ed Chianese was actively horrible in Light, and they ended up being compelling characters whose fate I was invested in. Light also had the puzzle angle of the two times going on; seeing them coalesce was impressive.I very much do think Empty Space was good; Harrison’s commitment to obfuscating what was going on over the books, in artful and compelling ways, paid off with the wrap up, and I found the return to Kearney’s exwife fascinating. I think if you were properly hooked by Light’s structure and characters, both the follow up books could miss, but I found the setting and the themes around the Tract, the lyrical nature of the prose and the unflinching view of man in context with the immensity of the universe to be deeply compelling. YMMV
Surely H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” deserves a mention here…
It’s pretty strange to write a brief history of The Zone and not bring up The Colour Out Of Space. That novel is basically page one in the history of Zones.
As I understand this article, the Colour Out of Space certainly has a Zone, but it doesn’t fill the same narrative purpose of Zones as they have in later works. This article is about how these stories have people who enter the Zone in order to reach a destination or attain a goal, but the victims in Colour Out of Space are within the area of the Zone when it’s created. They have no destination, they’re not seeking something within the Zone, they just try to stay in their home as it gets irrevocably changed and then they die.
That’s fair. Though, I’ve read Colour Out of Space, Roadside Picnic and Book 1 of Southern Reach (trying not to sound smug, I promise), and the latter two just would not exist without the former. It’s more than just the first; most that followed are reminiscent of it. My thinking is that the author of this article might not be aware of it at all, which you would assume considering he’s writing “the history” of the idea.
The order you read books of similar nature in can radically redefine your perception of their content as well. This may be part of your difference in concept.
True, but you can’t go back to all the antecedents and influences. If the author traced The Zone all the way back we’d find enchanted forests and Mount Olympus. The author is here writing about a specific kind of Zone, and that one his influenced our views of real Zones like Chernobyl.
I agree, but I would argue that JG Ballard’s The Crystal World fits just about every characteristic of modern “Zone fiction,” and that predates Roadside Picnic by half a decade or more.
Damnit, I was just about to say The Crystal World, in which a group of people attempt to make their way through a jungle in which a bizarre agent infects all living things that come into contact with it and transmutes them into crystal (and a bunch of them decide to commit suicide by staying there). Yes, it came out in 1966, and Roadside Picnic wasn’t published until 1972, which kind of puts a crimp on the ‘the Zone is intrinsically Soviet in origin’ idea. I think TCW is really what most of these others are imitating – certainly Southern Reach seems like an homage. Certainly I think the film producers must have thought so too, because both Annihilation (the film) and The Crystal World have a character called Ventress, which is surely too specific to be a coincidence.
Then again, coincidences abound with the Zone… such as, The Crystal World says that the same phenomenon can be found in two other places – in a part of the southern United States… and in Pripyat.More generally, the idea of an area of dangerous wilderness where humans are unwelcome and frequently weird supernatural things happen, but where adventurers pick through unexplainable structures in search of precious artifacts (often the ruins of a more sophisticated civilisation, non-human or sci-fi-human, that the adventurers cannot possibly understand), is of course a cornerstone of fantasy, particularly pulp fantasies of the first half of the century and then into dying earth fantasies in the next few decades (The Dying Earth, 1950). Likewise, the idea of the protagonist passing through a totally bizarre zone (often another plane of existence) where the laws of nature don’t apply. Zone fiction essentially takes these two ideas from fantasy, moves them into a SF setting, and combines them with Lovecraft’s ideas of a unexplainable entity or power (often, as in Lovecraft’s story, an alien intelligence or artifact) having an inimical, mutating effect on the surrounding area.
Oh! Don’t know that one. I’ll check it out this weekend. Thanks.
What a sad world we live in when mentioning that you’ve read three books has to come with a proviso that you’re not a snob.
Or House of Leaves.
Also “Hinterlands” by William Gibson.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinterlands_(short_story)
That’s pretty much a riffing of Frederick Pohl’s “Gateway” series, though. Although maybe Pohl was influenced by Roadside Picnic/Stalker? The first book was written in 1977.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_(novel)
I recall a golden age or earlier “two-fisted spaceman” sorta pulp novel where the humans were using portals left behind by precursor aliens. Unfortunately, I read a crap ton of pulp sci-fi back in the day and I can’t recall any details. I think this (and related) tropes are pretty old. Maybe is was one of the Lensman books?
Turns out the real Zone was the friends we made along the way.
If you define it loosely enough I think you could pick a lot more than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stalker and/or Roadside Picnic also had some influence from the Algis Budrys novella “Rogue Moon”– the weird area there is on the Moon rather than Earth, but it’s an alien-influenced terrain where physics are all wrong and you have to walk through it in an ultra-specific ritualistic way or get horribly destroyed.
page one is Roadside Picnic
Or Spiral Zone
I’ll just leave the short film I help make here.
“Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker sits high in the pantheon of great art-house science fiction, transforming Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic into a characteristically heady and gorgeous meditation on the director’s pet themes: art, hope, fear, water, death, and so on.”
Why does everyone gloss over Tarkovsky’s obvious religious imagery and notions, especially in Stalker? “It’s hard not to feel the Zone as a simulacrum for the internet itself in these late days of humanity: an increasingly cursed realm through which we willingly stalk, despite our certain knowledge of its very unreality…”In Stalker, The Zone is very real and by no means is cursed. What movie did you watch? Only in The Zone are things made right.
Now I’m wondering if Kojima’s “Death Stranding” will fit into the Zone subgenre. I already figured it was “The Postman, but weird,” but now I’m suspecting there’s more than a little Roadside Picnic to that game’s world.
I think Control would also count as part of this, or at least it has a lot of the same DNA
Owes a lot to John Brunner’s To Conquer Chaos (1964), and Day of the Star Cities (1965). And arguably just a grittier take on exploration fiction in general…
Stalker is positively uncanny in how it anticipates the Chernobyl disaster a half decade before it happened. You go to the exclusion zone today, and it looks like something out of Stalker. And to make the coincidence even more eerie, much of the filming of Stalker took places in waters that were either dumping grounds or were downstream from some chemical facilities, and Tarkovsky, his wife and the lead actor would ALL die from aggressive forms of cancer within twenty years.
HyperNormalisation is incredible, and you pretty much nailed the experience of watching it. Yes there are many moments of pretty insane Curtis leaps of logic, and a couple times where I just blurted out “OH COME ON…” But I was also completely transfixed by it and felt (and still feel) like it comes closest to defining our current moment.
It may not extend all the way to Putin’s rise to power, which was more about blaming oligarchs for looting resources and then taking those same resources for government cronies, but citations are certainly not needed when claiming that the Soviet Union simply stated what reality was and murdered or imprisoned anyone foolish enough to state otherwise. The Russian Wheat Harvest is a thing exactly because not only was no one willing to admit how bad the harvest was, as the figures moved up the reporting chain of command they kept fudging the numbers to the better until a famine became a record crop. Never mind that there wasn’t bread for people to eat. No one was going up against the wall to call it out, and even if they had there was no means for that message to spread. 1984 is likewise built around this structure of misinformation and paranoia.
In America a major city was swallowed by the sea and the city was left to rot as people literally drowned in the streets.
Theres a zone – a dome – in the Doctor Who series The Daemons (1971).Later ripped off by The Dome.
There was another “zone” movie, just within like a decade before Annihilation, where the zone was the result of some contamination from a probe or something? And it had subsumed some big chunk of Northern Mexico and the Southern US? I remember some sort of confrontation with a Zone Creature in an abandoned gas station? Anybody recognize the one I’m talking about?Edit: Ha! It was called “Monsters.” I tried searching a little better. Sure sounds like it should qualify as a zone movie to me.
Ah, you’re thinking of “Highway to the Danger Zone (Danger Zooooone!)”
Ah yeah, directed by Gareth Edwards, who later directed Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One. I quite liked Monsters for its overall tone and relative realism (although it was kind of hilarious when the protagonists step out of a Mexican jungle and, a few hundred yards away, is the U.S. border. There are no Mexican jungles anywhere near the U.S. border).Plus, Scoot!
Wasn’t the jungle supposed to have been a byproduct of the zone’s effect on the surrounding ecosystem? (I know the summaries just talk about tentacled creatures, but I could have sworn that there were also environmental effects and ancillary lifeforms…)
It wasn’t just the jungle, though. There were Mayan pyramids too.
Monsters- I was surprised it wasn’t referenced in the article. There was also a sci-fi short story that I read many years ago, that was set in South Africa and was taken from the POV of two characters that were sitting a watching the Savannah slowly being transformed; I recall a bit about a bull elephant charging through the barrier to the other side and changing into a crystalline form.
and if you see a dark haired woman in a purple dress, run, there are tentacles.
Don’t think Annihilation should count because all the characters were alien(ated) from the beginning. Try The Endless, which has people. One note, the Soviet economy didn’t collapse until the Yeltsin years, with capitalist restoration. And Roadside Picnic was published in 1971. The Strugatsky Brothers are defunct, and there are only a couple of works by one since they got what they wanted. Perhaps they have been silenced by the magnitude of their folly.
I somehow haven’t noticed this sub-series “Infinite Scroll” before. This is like “TVtropes, the Long Read format”. I like it.
The Lovecraftesque stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan in her “Black Helicopters” and related works fall into this category too, I think. I liked them quite a bit. (But then, I liked Vandermeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, too.)
The Zone, too, is a little less mysterious in the novel, described fairly clearly as the byproduct of some sort of superintelligence passing through the earth. The humans swarming it are compared to ants crawling over the leftovers of a roadside picnic—inconsequential, ill-equipped, and hungry.I’d like to point out that this description is given by a scientist who is waxing intellectual on the subject at a bar even bringing up Vonnegut in the discussion. I know he helps set the tone and is even where the book gets it’s name but Red finds hope in the zone. It’s origin is of no consequence to the main character and is simply the subject of bar conversation and never really given more exposition.
This article reminded me it’s time to dig out my pouch of bolts, hike off into the woods and read roadside picnic again.
Does anybody have a good list of these? I tried TvTropes’ “Eldritch Location” page, but the examples are a bit too… broad. My favorites I’ve found on my own are SMT: Strange Journey, Made in Abyss, and, on a smaller scale, House of Leaves.
I was also interested in this, so I combed the comments and dumped info into this google doc.
Thanks, nice reference doc! You missed The Crystal World by JG Ballard, though.(Also, the “Highway to the danger zone” mentions are just jokes referencing the song/Archer catchphrase. And it’s Jeff VanderMeer, not Alex—Alex Garland directed the movie adaptation.)
I imagine there would be plenty of narrative and thematic differences, but I wonder about comparing and contrasting this scifi concept of ‘Zone” and the fantasy/fairytale/mythological concept of Faerie. I am not familiar enough with either concept to go much further than wondering about possible similarities and connections.
Along the lines of the films you have mentioned, and if interested, you might want to check out a Soviet SF movie from 1967 called Tainstvennaya stena (The Mysterious Wall), which in a couple of ways plays out as an early version of Annihilation (the movie – I have not read the book).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Wall
Spiral Zone
I really think the “Zone” is a subset of “The Hero’s Journey”, which is the basis of almost all speculative fiction. It goes back to early stories by the Greeks and Romans of far off lands and has continued in fiction like Gulliver’s Travels. The hero’s journey allows for an infinite number of settings, encounters and experiences. The hero typically has a goal and encounters many situations along the way that are metaphors for current social issues and life in general. Almost all post-apocalyptic stories are examples of the hero’s journey.
I’ve always a big fan of the Danger Zone, and the highway to said area.
Oh I thought of another one a bit ago: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. It’s pretty cool in that The Zone is basically any part of the world that isn’t kept reletively stable and sane by the Jorgmond Pipe.
I had read Roadside Picnic a while ago and thought it a little bland, which was probably my fault as a reader.
The audiobook just popped up recently for me on Libby (free electronic and audio books with your library card) and I thought I’d listen to it for a little bit. Fantastic narration by character actor Robert Forster. You might not recognize his name, but you’ll know his voice. I ended up devouring the thing in like three days. You know an audiobook is great when your spouse knocks on the window of your car and asks why you’ve been sitting in the driveway for 40 minutes.
and the game SMT Strange Journey! a zone expanding from Antarctica
See Made in Abyss for an excellent manga/anime version. Be warned that it is super compelling, but it also gets VERY dark.
Although I’m one of the rare book fans who actually mostly like Garland’s wildly differing adaptation, I absolutely detest changing the name of Area X to The Shimmer.
“That Stalker, Roadside Picnic, and the Chernobyl disaster are all products of the late Soviet Union is no coincidence.”The way I’ll always remember the Cold War is that the U.S.S.R. was itself the world’s biggest Zone.
This quote about the Soviet Union during its collapse really got to me, because it applies to far too many people in the United States right now: “You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.”. I feel like I’m in the zone lately, especially living in a “red” area.
If we’re adding novels then Robert Silverberg’s “The Man in the Maze” should be mentioned.
So, Infinite Scroll manages to discuss Zones without mentioning The Great Concavity from Infinite Jest. Fair enough. Feral hogs ain’t got shit on feral hamsters, the true piss-colored harbingers of doom.
Also, there’s this latest version of the Zone…
When this article brought up Adam Curtis and HyperNormalisation I truly lost my shit. A+, more of this please
In China Miéville’s novella The Last Days of New Paris, the Nazis still control France and a great swath of Paris has been warped into a live-action surrealist nightmare, where creatures called Manifs emerge from a rupture in space-time. From the cover blurb: “In 1950, a lone surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict and the streets are stalked by living images and texts – and by the forces of hell. To escape the city, Thibaut must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.”
IThank you for this article very well documented.Although I love the movie (too underrated) “Monsters”, I think his area is not quite comparable. Stalker Zones and Annihilation Zones are areas that can physically transform the Stalker and mark it psychologically. Although Monsters is an initiatory quest the area remains fairly “normal” without loss of reference in those who walk and especially without delusional physical transformation.On the other hand, I would like to include a Zone resulting from a great masterpiece that has been adapted many times: SOLARIS. It contains all the ingredients of Annihilation and Stalker including that of the animistic presence and the incomprehensible will. The impact on the physical and the psychic being there, materialized by the “ghosts”.
“The works themselves can seem cursed.”That explains why I never beat Shadow of Chernobyl. My first playthrough, a Steam update wiped out my save files. My second playthrough, I had a catastrophic computer failure at around the same place in the game.My third playthrough, I quit before I got to that same point a third time. I was too spooked to take a chance of something else failing spectacularly.
While not itself a straightforward example of Zone fiction, the Parties are for Losers song series by Ferry is very much based on Roadside Picnic and its derivative works, especially S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Great piece – thank you! Reminded me of an excellent article I read a few years ago which looked primarily at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and memory, highly recommend:
https://eefb.org/retrospectives/how-a-ukrainian-computer-game-transfigured-folkloric-processes-of-remembering/