Retrospect: Origin

A scout nicknamed the Stargazer selects a wounded man in the Zone and, chased by a pack, delivers him to the Perimeter to the military. The injured man comes to his senses and carries complete nonsense—he talks about some CIS, and doesn’t know obvious things: it’s the year 2001, and the USSR still exists. But, as it turns out, that’s only the tip of the iceberg in the tangled web of rapidly unfolding events that affects not only the Zone and the people within it, but also the outside world beyond the Perimeter—revealing the story of its origin and raising the question: what is it, really?\n\nFrom the author:\n\nThe 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…