The STALKER universe is based on the story of the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky “Picnic on the Sidelines”, its adaptation of “Stalker”, shot by director Andrei Tarkovsky, as well as the events that actually happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.
This franchise currently includes a series of video games, comics, films, and books. Many Russian authors, both popular and less well-known, take part in writing books for the STALKER universe. Magazine World of Fantasy called this series of novels one of the most successful novelization projects.
The book "STALKER. Connected by a Zone ”, written by Roman Kulikov and Jerzy Tumanovsky, is the 16th part of the series in chronology.
Authors Information
Roman Kulikov was born on May 18, 1976 in Russia, in Penza. He has two higher educations (engineer and lawyer specialties).
Kulikov’s acquaintance with the STALKER universe was due to computer games. Once, a future writer saw a video on the Internet about one of the games in the series. Kulikov went to the official website, where a literary contest was held. Soon he wrote two stories, both of which were in the top ten works. From this began the creative path of Roman Kulikov.
Jerzy Tumanovsky (pseudonym, real name of the writer - Dmitry K.) was born in Yekaterinburg. There is not much information about his biography, but it is known that they met Roman Kulikov at the same literary contest held in 2003-2004.
In addition to “Related by the Zone”, these writers own many other novels, including in the STALKER series. Together they created two more works: “The Bayonet” and “The Vaccination against greed”.
"Connected by a zone." Short story
The novel was published by AST in 2009.
The annotation “Connected by a Zone” tells of a stalker nicknamed Flint, who decided to end the sorties into the Zone and return to normal life. For a while, Alexei Kozhevnikov lived happily with his family and worked as a senior foreman in a factory repair team, completely without recalling the years devoted to stalking.
But any stalker knows that the Zone does not let anyone go for nothing. Once she again reminds herself, and Kozhevnikov-Flint is forced to return there again in order to save the life of his son. During the trip, Flint will meet other people who also have their own goals. Some of them will become his associates, and some will be enemies.
Next book
The first chapters of the direct sequel to “Related by the Zone” were released in May 2017. At the moment, the novel is not finished, and already written chapters exist only in electronic form. The book “Connected by Zone-2”, like the first part, was written by Roman Kulikov in collaboration with Jerzy Tumanovsky.
The creation of the sequel began 8 years after the first book, but during this time the authors released several more works in the series - “Bayonet”, “Call of Pripyat”, “Clear Sky” and others. Many of them in one way or another contained references to the “Related Zone” - the reader could meet familiar names or places of action. The second part of the book is not just a direct continuation of the first, but also completes the entire cycle, including 9 novels.