Afterword and the Word "Stalker"
In my Kindle version of Roadside Picnic the text ends on p. 193 and, on the same page, begins an Afterword by Boris Strugatsky. Lots of interesting tidbits here: re the writing and publishing of the novel in Soviet Russia, but I'll only allude to the interesting discussion of the word "stalker": Apparently, the term "stalker" came to us in the process of working on the first pages of the book. As for the "prospectors" and "trappers," we didn't like those terms to begin with; I remember this well. We were the ones who introduced the English word "stalker" into the Russian language . Stalker --pronounced "stullker" in Russian--is one of the few words we "coined" that came into common use. Stalker spread far and wide, although I'd guess that this was mainly because of the 1979 film of that name, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and based on our book. . . . It would have been more correct to say ...