The authors say they took the term from the Stalky & Co novel. In the book, stalkers are people who trespass into the forbidden area known as the Zone and steal its valuable extraterrestrial artifacts, which the stalkers sell. The term stalker became a part of the Russian language and, according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is loosely based on the novel, with a screenplay written by the Strugatsky brothers. The book has been the source of many adaptations and other inspired works in a variety of media, including stage plays, video game, and television series. Stanislaw Lem wrote an afterword to the German edition of 1977.
A preface to the first American edition was written by Theodore Sturgeon.
The story is published in English in a translation by Antonina W. As of 2003, Boris Strugatsky counted 55 publications of Roadside Picnic in 22 countries. It is the brothers' most popular and most widely translated novel outside the former Soviet Union. Roadside Picnic (Russian: Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine, IPA: ) is a philosophical science fiction novel by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971 and published in 1972.
