I just finished reading Roadside Picnic…

It’s the story that inspired the movie Stalker, which eventually inspired the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. So, of course, I had to read it.  I couldn’t find a copy of it available for purchase anywhere…  But I was able to download a PDF copy of the story.

The story itself is quite interesting…

Some aliens visit the Earth for some unknown reason.  The areas where they land become contaminated in some way…  Reality doesn’t quite work the way it should there – strange artifacts and phenomena abound.

These areas (called Zones) are cordoned off by the government and studied by scientists.  Some people, called stalkers, make money by acquiring artifacts in The Zone and selling them to the highest bidder.

The protagonist, Red, is a stalker.  Initially he’s in the employ of the scientists, and moonlighting a little less legally on the side…  But eventually he winds up completely self-employed.

We follow him through a couple trips into The Zone.  We find out that his wife is pregnant, and that the children of stalkers are frequently mutated in some way.

Red gets taken away to jail…  Comes back out to find his child much older and less healthy than when he want in…

Eventually Red goes into The Zone in search of the Golden Ball – an artifact that supposedly has the ability to grant wishes.

Of course there’s plenty of material that I’m leaving out…  Nor am I doing any of the characters any justice…  But it’s a short story, and there’s a limit to just how much I can summarize without simply re-telling the whole thing.

The story feels Russian.  Even if I hadn’t known that it was written by a Russian author, I would have suspected that it had some sort of ties to Russia.

Many of the characters have Russian-sounding names…  As do some of the locations.  The government, the scientists, the police, and the military all have this over-arching bureaucracy that seems Russian in flavor.  Pretty much everyone drinks heavily.  There are checkpoints, and everyone seems to be bribing someone.

Of course I’m stereotyping…  I have no idea what it is actually like in Russia…  But all of these things, combined, seem to hint at a Russian origin.

Which makes things very confusing when you realize that the story takes place in Canada.

The Zone, the city nearby, the Institute, all the checkpoints…  All of it is in Canada.  But none of it seems terribly Canadian.

Maybe a Canada that had been conquered by Russia?  Maybe simply Canada written from a Russian perspective?

Regardless…  It seems a bit odd to have so many stereotypically Russian elements, and then have it all set in Canada.

There are also some language oddities…  Not necessarily translation problems, but phrases that just don’t quite seem right.  I’m sure they make perfect sense if you grew up in Russia, but they seem slightly odd to an American.

Terrific story though.  Very evocative.  Very thought-provoking.

It reminded me a lot of Sphere – enough so that I have to assume Michael Crichton read and was inspired by Roadside Picnic.  The central issue in both stories, ultimately, really isn’t the alien visitors nor the artifacts they leave behind.  The central issue is what we humans do with these things we can barely understand.

But where Crichton wraps things up fairly neatly at the end of his book, the Strugatskys leave the question wide open.

Examiner.com | Atheism holiday exhibits physically attacked

You know your position is weak when you don’t dare let the opposition speak…

Slashdot | Scientists Postulate Extinct Hominid With 150 IQ

Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to ‘alien abductors’ in movies. Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote: ‘Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain.’ The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens — that is, ourselves. ‘With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,’ write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? ‘Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 BC. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex,’ write Lynch and Granger. ‘They were born just a few millennia too soon.’

Well, first, let’s ignore the whole “postulate” thing…  They don’t actually know how big these guys brains were, they’re just looking at the size of the cavity in the skull.  And they don’t know how smart they would have been, they’re just guessing from the size of their brains.  So it’s all pretty speculative.

And then there’s the question of whether Boskop Man is actually a separate genus…

The part that caught my eye was this:

The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor

Which is just plain wrong.

Evolution does not produce more advanced or complex animals…  It produces more fit animals.  Animals that are better adapted to survive in their current environment.

Just in time for my nook to arrive, I’ve finished reading Ghost Story.

I’ve always been a fan of the movie…  It’s kind of the quintessential winter movie.  It’s so bleak and cold.  The small New England town…  The old men reliving tales of their youth…  The pervasive sense of death hanging over everything…  The snow…  Every bit of that movie simply screams winter.

So, I had to read the book.

For everyone who told me that the book was vastly superior – you were right…  Sort of.

Frankly, the book and the movie are so dis-similar that it’s hard to compare them.

Much like Dune and the movie based on it…  The two are different enough to be perfectly enjoyable based on their own merits.

It took me quite some time to get into Ghost Story…  The first couple dozen pages are all about Don driving a little girl down to Florida.  You’ve got no idea who Don is at this point in the story, nor who the girl is, nor why either of them would be heading toward Florida…  I couldn’t decide which of them was the villain…  Which one I should care about…  Hell, I didn’t even know what was going on.

Then the story shifts back to Millburn…  You meet the Chowder Society…  Start getting to know some people…  Bad things start to happen…  And then I was completely hooked.

The biggest problem I had was simply reconciling the book to the movie.  I’ve got such strong ideas of how things happened from the movie, that it was hard to read something completely different in the book.  And it was truly completely different.

Ghost Story, the movie, takes the title a bit too literally.  It is about a group of men who accidentally kill a woman, and she comes back to haunt them.  She is literally deceased, and come back as a ghost.  It is a haunting.

Ghost Story, the book, means the word “ghost” more metaphorically.  It refers more to the memories and deeds that haunt us…  Our past…  The skeletons in our closet…  Our baggage.  The woman doesn’t come back to haunt them as a ghost, because she never died.  Not really.  Since she was never human to begin with.

It’s still a tale of the supernatural…  Still creepy and horrific…  But it just isn’t a ghost story, exactly.  It’s more of a monster story.

I felt a great fondness for the characters in the Chowder Society.  A bunch of classy old men who were enjoying life to the best of their abilities.  They had problems…  Regrets…  Issues…  They were very humanly flawed characters…  But very likable.

The town of Milburn, as well, was a likable character.  Full of New England-y goodness…

And the villain…  The thing that called itself Alma Mobley…  Absolutely wonderful.  I haven’t read such a detestable villain in a very long time.

A thoroughly enjoyable read.

My nook has arrived.

It was a rather late delivery by UPS…  Despite the tracking information indicating that it was “out for delivery” I really didn’t think I’d be seeing it today.  But, here it is.

Showed up in a large, plain, brown cardboard box…  Which contained the nook retail packaging within.

The retail packaging has a nice, minimalist, Apple-ish feel to it.  Lots of clear plastic and textured white paper.  Very understated.

I registered it, plugged it into my computer…  It shows up as a generic USB device, no funky software to sync it or anything weird like that.  It immediately started downloading an update.

The 3G out here is about as bad as I figured it would be…  It shows a strong signal, but the speed is horrible.  Good think the nook has wi-fi.  I was quickly able to connect it to my WLAN and the update downloaded much faster.

The update, once it was downloaded, immediately applied itself – which I did not appreciate.  I was in the middle of poking through the menus and it just rebooted and started applying the update.  I would have liked to be asked permission first…  Or at the very least been warned about what was going to happen.

Another minor complaint is with the USB connector.  The nook itself does not have a  miniUSB plug…  It looks more like microUSB, but I’m not certain.  Which means I have to use the cable that shipped with the nook, and not one of the many miniUSB cables I already have.  This won’t be terribly inconvenient here at home…  But if I want to charge or sync my nook anywhere else I’ll need to remember the cable.

My final complaint is that the microSD cardslot isn’t nearly as accessible as I would like.  You have to remove the entire back panel…  Which seems vaguely flimsy and entirely too likely to break if removed too often.  And then the microSD cardslot itself is less of a slot than a flap…  The flap has to be flipped up, the card inserted, and then the flap flipped back down.  Again it seems to fragile for frequent use.  Obviously the intent is to put in an SD card and leave it there to increase storage capacity, and not to use card swapping as a way to sync the device.