Retrospect: Ashes

A vicious wind whipped over the chilled, damp plain, lifting clouds of dust toward the barely visible edge of the sky. Through the gloomy, solid darkness, the sun reluctantly pushed its way through—dim, grimly crimson, frozen along the line where night and day merge into one. Sudden bursts of light illuminated the space, cutting through the dark sky; in powerless despair they struck the ground with whips of lightning, as if trying to restart a stopped heart. Futile, hopeless—the dull world is dead. How will the path end for those who, by the will of fate, were drawn into the Universal Abyss?..

From the author:

The book was written a long time ago—about ten years back—but it hasn’t lost its relevance since then. Retrospect is a cycle of five books written in the setting of the popular game universe S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The publishing series, which began quite well as an idea, soon turned into a commercial project where publishers wanted to make a profit and slid into a five-sorted piece of entertaining trash-muck. Probably, the book was written as a counterpoint to that—wanting to return everything to the original source of the world of the Strugatskys, to “Roadside Picnic,” where, as scenery, I took a partially recognizable game world, but the ideas were completely different... Unexpectedly for me, besides the atmosphere of the anomalous Zone, the book began to take on the shape of an alternative history in which the USSR, with pain and blood, was able to put an end to its fateful moment, survive, and change for the better—yet then faced the emergence of the Anomalous Zone in place of the former thirty-kilometer exclusion zone.... Initially, the book was prepared for a paper edition, but due to a number of legal, and then publishing complications, it remained—how do they say it on the table...