Backlisted - Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Roadside Picnic, first published in 1972, is the best-known work of Russia’s most famous modern science fiction writers, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, together the authors of 26 novels and scores of short stories. To discuss it we are joined by the writer and radio presenter Jennifer Lucy Allan, and the publisher and translator Ilona Chavasse. The book is based on the premise that Earth has been briefly visited by an alien civilisation that have left behind them six ‘Zones’, places strewn with their debris, some of it lethal to humans; all of it fascinating and perplexing. The Zones feed a black market in artefacts supplied by ‘Stalkers’ who are prepared to risk their lives and sanity by entering the forbidden areas to retrieve them. We consider why the book is still considered one of the greatest of all SF novels, how it came to be read as a dark foreshadowing of the Chernobyl disaster and why it has proved itself so ripe for adaptation, both as a series of video games and, most famously, as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic 1979 film, Stalker. This episode also finds Andy returning to a haunting novel he read earlier this year: The High House (Swift Press) by former guest Jessie Greengrass, while John is carried away by Everybody (Picador), Olivia Laing’s magnificent book about freedom and the human body. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 08:17 - The High House by Jessie Greengrass. 17:04 - Everybody by Olivia Laing 23:32 - Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free.

Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. so we're going to have a little conversation about where we're calling from. And so I'm going to start with you, Ilona. Ilona, where are you here today in the world? I am not in North London. No, that's a complete lie.

Of course, I'm in North London. Oh, OK. How unusual. I am sorry to tell you. I have a small asshole puppy just outside where I'm broadcasting from, trying to get in and pee on my feet. So let's see how long I can keep this going in an intellectual fashion without letting him do it.

Did you just call your puppy an asshole? Yeah. Because we've got like, in your intro, there's another insult to your puppy, which I'm looking forward to reading out. You hate your puppy. What's wrong with you? I love my puppy. If you Google my puppy is an asshole,

you get so many return pages. It's like a hot topic around the world. You know, I'm not alone. Invite me back in about 100 episodes and he'll be fine, you know. Let's hope your puppy never hears this. He wouldn't give a shit, Andy. He wouldn't give a shit, Andy. He wouldn't give a shit.

Oh, dear. Jen, where are you? I am in Los Angeles on... What? Los Angeles, Yorkshire? Or Los Angeles, California? I am in Echo Park, just off Sunset Boulevard. No, not in Echo Park. My God, Echo Park.

Yeah. That's incredible. I'm on a research trip for the next book, sort of bouncing around some archives and stuff. And last week you were in Bogota. I was indeed. I went to see a giant terracotta-fired house, as you do. Is your next book about terracotta, or would you prefer not to say?

It's about clay, so in many ramifications. It's about clay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yes. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I was going to say, because giant terracotta house,

that sounds like one of those kind of consonants type games. Yeah, yeah. Let's just put random words together. Yeah, what three words? kind of consonants type game. Yeah, yeah. Let's just put random words together. Yeah, what three words? No, it's kind of like this big outsider architect project.

So it's a bit like the Palais Ideal, but also looks like a Gaudi that's not been decorated. Wow. It's bizarre. Wow. Do you know what, John? I'm sorry. This is the best opening chat we've done for months.

I'm already hysterical. This is of the highest quality. So now why not take us into the main body of the show? Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us on a cold, damp morning just after dawn. We appear to be walking across a swamp by the side of a disused railway embankment. It's not clear where we are or when this is taking place. Fog swirls around

our knees and the smell of damp rust and decay fills the morning air. Ahead of us, two men stand in silence near an abandoned rail car. One of the men slips out a hip flask from his backpack and takes a swig. He offers it to the other who refuses. There is an eerie silence. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of

The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by two guests, Jennifer Lucy Allen, who previously joined us back in 2019 for the episode on Ray Bradbury's The Illust illustrated man and ilona shavas making her backlisted debut hello both of you thank you for coming welcome welcome welcome hello thank you for coming from north london and la la jennifer lucy allen is a writer researcher and radio presenter she's written for the guardian the quietest of the wire and is the co-host of bbc radio 3 program late junction her first book foghorns lament the disappearing music of the coast was published by our friends white rabbit books in 2021 and has become

one of laurie anderson's favorite books how did you yes you may well punch the air like tiger woods sinking apart how how did you come to discover that we got it to her somewhere through my amazing agent natalie galician who's fantastic um and she did a she did a sort of quote for the jacket and did the best quote that i'm ever going to get in my whole life and now I'm not sure how to carry on and think I don't know how I apply for retirement at this age but but I'd like to who's the equivalent in the in the clay world that you could that is what I've got to work out now Laurie Anderson though that is amazing congratulations that's a brilliant thing brilliant brilliant thing and Brian Eno gave it a thumbs up too Brian Eno and Cozy Funny Tutti and Jomie Deller

it was yeah White Rabbit are excellent cheerleaders leave works magic they are in do very good Ilona Shavas works in publishing and in her copious spare time translates from the Russian, including the novels of, help me out, Ilona, Yuri... Ritkow. The latest of which is When the Whales Leave. And most recently, The Village at the Edge of Noon, a mystical thriller coming out soon from Angry Robot, as well as occasionally reportage and Russian-style limericks.

Okay. Russian-style limericks. Okay. Russian style limericks. What's that? They're these little poems called pyrozhok, which means a dumpling in Russian. They don't rhyme and they usually end very, very badly. Great. They don't rhyme and they end badly.

It sounds like all the poetry I've ever written. I'm in. Ilona lives in London with her family and works at Unbound with the publisher, John Mitchinson. Indeed she does. She has a new puppy, if you've been listening from the beginning of this podcast. And it says here, he's a bit of a shitbag.

I'm sorry, it's on my mind. Literal and metaphorical, I'm presuming. Absolutely. Is your puppy at the stage where he eats socks and you have to spray your shoes and your feet with some kind of spray to keep him away? Well, there's a terrible synchronicity in that the puppy is at the stage where he eats socks

and my son is at the stage where he leaves them everywhere. And it's bad. Okay, what is the puppy's name? His name is Pilot. Okay, is that Pilot as in Pontius or Pilot as in... January. Pilot as in Mr. Rochester's dog in Jane Eyre. Did you just say Mr. Rochester's dog in Jane Eyre who is called Pilot?

I did just say that. Wow, that is very cool. I mean, calling a puppy Pilot, P-i-l-a-t-e that's a kind of that's a kind of ambivalent expression of affection isn't it but anyway no wonder he's an asshole the shitbag puppy pilot anyway johnny excellent the book we're here to discuss is roadside picnic by arkadyady and Boris Strigatsky, first published in the literary magazine Aurora in 1972 in the Soviet Union. But because of censorship problems, it didn't get published in book form in the Soviet Union until 1980, and even then only in a heavily

censored version. Its first English translation was published in the US by Macmillan in 1977. And then in 2012, shortly before his death, Boris Strugatsky approved a new translation of the complete text, restored in its correct order with all the censorship taken out, by Olena Bomyshenko. And that was published by the Chicago Review Press in the US and Galantz in the UK in their SF Masterworks series. But before we start throwing nuts and bolts at one another, Andy,

what have you been reading this week? I've been reading The High House by Jesse Greengrass, the novelist Jesse Greengrass, our former guest who joined us on episode 105 to talk about The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald this novel came out last year in 2021 and is now available in paperback

it was shortlisted for the Costa prize the soon to be known Costa prize and I read it actually in the summer during the unpleasantly globally warmed heat wave that we experienced in the UK in August, which was both fitting and terrifying

because The High House is a novel about what the future might look like in the era of global warming. And for those of you of a certain age, you may remember the television series Survivors from the early 70s. In a sense, The High House is a version of Survivors, but rather than being so brutal as that series is, it focuses on what it would mean to a small semi-family unit whose environment has been prepared for them by their mother an environmental scientist who's aware of what is coming perhaps more than than than else is. It deals with crisis not as a sudden moment of arrival,

but as a creeping reality of entropy, I suppose you would say. So we're dealing with a woman called Francesca, who is Caro's stepmother and a boy called Paulie's mother. And the high house of the Tit is was once their holiday home it's now looked after by locals Sally and her granddad who's called Grandy and Francesca has turned it into an arc for when the time comes when as she sees it society will not survive the creep of global warming so there's a mill that powers the generator there's an orchard that is pruned to try and produce as much fruit as it can the greenhouse has all its glass still there so so they're not quite a family but the idea is they're ready to face

whatever's coming i found this deeply moving and depressing uh and beautiful novel and uh i wouldn't to read just read a bit which i think encompasses all those bits. Also, by the way, John, the epigraph of this novel comes from Basil Bunting's Brig Flats. It does. You've read this, haven't you? I have, and I totally concur. I was haunted by it. I think she's, on a sort of sentence-by-sentence level,

just one of the most interesting writers, as they say, at work in English fiction and non-fiction. She does sort of non-fiction, Seybaldian non-fiction as well. I thought this was such a good book. I'm almost ashamed that I didn't get to it sooner, but I'm very happy to be able to talk about it today. We talked about her wonderful collection of stories, the one about the Great Orc by one who observed it but she's an amazing writer. So I'm going to read a bit first of all you're going to hear from Sally who is the

one of the girl who lives locally and then you're going to hear from Caro very briefly who is the stepdaughter of Francesca who has set all this up. And this is from near the end of the book. But I think this gives you a flavour of what I'm talking about. The seas are rising. That's what you need to know at this point. Sally says, Sally says, It was easy to believe, all through those long grey weeks of rain, that we were already the only ones left in the universe. But in truth, I think I could still feel them, the others.

The cities and the towns of people who went about their business as usual. Finding their small familiar joys and telling one another that, after all, it was the best they could do. The rain fell on all of us. It drenched us the same, and in the weeks and months after the flood, that is what was lost. The sense of being a small part of a whole, which persisted even when we might dislike everything about it. Afterwards, all that was left were fragments, people who clung on, as we did. We saw them. They came often in those first few weeks to see what happened to the village. Perhaps they thought it would be a safe place to stay. All the news was of the cities

which had been hit, and the only way to find out about places like this was to see for yourself. Paulie had a pair of binoculars that Grandy had given him for Christmas, and we used them to watch, hiding in the trees between the village and the high house. They came to the edge of the water to stand, looking, and then, after what might be five minutes or 30, they went away again, back the way they had come, towards the road. They've gone, Paulie called. And Caro and I came out from where we were hiding and carried on picking over the village. We were looking for anything we could salvage, things that have been stored above the water level, in attics or on the higher floors, clothes in particular, blankets, sewing kits. We took the light bulbs

out of their sockets. We hunted through drawers looking for batteries, for wire, for pairs of scissors. We took an axe to any wooden furniture we could find and carried it out as firewood. wooden furniture we could find and carried it out as firewood. Caro hated it. All the way through she kept her mouth tightly shut. She went into rooms quickly and left as soon as she could. She complained of headaches. She went to bed early but in the morning her face would be pale, her eyes dark and so I knew she didn't sleep. Now it is very rare that we see anybody. Sometimes there are boats, small yachts or dinghies, their sails sharp against the sky. Sometimes when I am at the field on the other side of the heath, the one which we use because it is above the flood line, even when the water has been at its highest, so that its earth is not saturated with salt, I see them in the distance, small groups walking slowly across the road.

Once there was a helicopter. There have been planes, although not for years. At the beginning we feared raiders, but I think Francesca hid us well. She told no one her plans, not even us, and we are on the way to nowhere but the sea. The house cannot be seen from the road. I think there are parts of the world which have fared better than others, or rather there are parts of the world where the people are still waiting. They will not come for us. Because if they did, then where would be the end of it? They have only so much.

And it is not as simple as letting everyone in. And then Caro says, and this, listeners, is for me why this book is so magical. We are not self-sufficient there is no such thing we rely on the stores we have left in the barn we rely on the chickens but the flock is shrinking we rely on the wheat but one bad year and we will have none left to sow a seed we rely on the tide pool and the generator which we cannot fix if it breaks we rely on the high house on its fabric on its shelter and protection but these things will not last forever we rely on one another i try not to be afraid, but I am.

Wow. It's beautiful. Yeah. So I strongly recommend that novel, The Higher House by Jesse Greengrass. Optimistic it is not, beautiful it is.

Johnny, what have you been reading this week? Okay, so I've been reading, it's interesting, all these books we're doing today have got certain points of contact. I've been reading Everybody by Olivia Lang. A Book About Freedom is the subtitle. It's a long essay, an exploration really of the body, particularly in the 20th century, the idea of the body as the thing that kind of

defines us and defines our limitations the idea i suppose that if a body could be truly free that that would be something worth fighting for and the book is as much about i suppose how people have tried to interpret bodily freedom through the 20th century as it is about how other people have tried to constrain them. So it's also a very personal book. It's about her from when she trained in Brighton, having grown up in a gay household and being very confused or unclear about what gender she was when she was a sort of adolescent she

left school to go and be a protester an environmental protester and then she trained to be a medicinal herbal doctor so in a way it's her journey but it's also about empathy it's a book if you were if you were interested in trying to understand any of the deep and complicated background to the trans debate let's just say this would be a brilliant place to start. It's also, it goes through illness. She looks in particular at Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker, the writers, through sexuality. She has amazing insights into Christopher Isherwood in Weimar Germany. She looks at violence against women. She writes really interestingly about Andrea Dworkin, the Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter. So it's got literature and it's got art and it's got philosophy and it is a rich and I think

incredibly beautifully constructed book. Rather extraordinarily, the theme that runs through it, it's also a sort of a book about Wilhelm Reich, the great psychoanalyst who ended up being a kind of a figure of fun pursued by the American authorities for being a spreader of perversion. The only state-sanctioned burning of books in American history was the burning of all his books in 1956. He wrote, amongst other things, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. But his kind of strange optimism is the thing that she locks into in the book. And I'll read you a little bit just to give you a feel for it. She says that,

Reich led me first to illness, the experience that makes us most forcibly aware of our bodily nature, the ways in which we are both permeable and mortal, a revelation that the COVID-19 outbreak would soon forcibly bring home across the world. meaningful. This was Sontag's criticism of him in Illness's Metaphor, and yet the more I discovered about her own experience of breast cancer, the more it seemed that the reality of illness in our lives is far more personal and complicated than she might have been willing to admit in print. As she put in her hospital diary, my body is talking louder, more plainly than I ever could. I didn't agree with Reich that orgasm could bring down the patriarchy or stop fascism. As James Baldwin tartly put it in an essay on Reich, the people I'd been raised amongst had orgasms all the time and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.

But his work on sex took me to Weimar Berlin, the birthplace of the modern sexual liberation movement, the numerous achievements of which seemed less secure by the day. Though Reich placed enormous faith in the liberatory possibilities of sex, sexual freedom is not such a straightforward matter as we might sometimes like to think, since it shares a border with violence and rape. Thinking about these less comfortable aspects of sex brought me to the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, to the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, and to the Marquis de Sade, who between them have mapped out one of the most difficult regions of bodily experience, where pleasure

intersects with and is usurped by pain. While the theories of Reich's later years were often bizarre, his battle with the Food and Drug Administration and subsequent imprisonment were clearly not unrelated to the issues with which he grappled throughout his life. What does freedom mean? Who is it for? What role does the state play in its preservation or curtailment? Can it be achieved by asserting the rights of the body, or as the painter Agnes Martin believed, by denying the body altogether? Reich's liberation machine might not have cured cancer or the common cold, but it did serve to expose a system of control and punishment that is invisible until you happen to transgress it in some way. His imprisonment in USP Lewisburg drew me to consider the paradoxical history of the prison reform movement, encountering the radical

ideas of Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin. They in turn opened up the realm of political activism and protest, the bodily struggle for a better world. Here I came upon the painter Philip Guston, who documented the cartoonish grotesque forms of those who tried to limit freedom, as well as the singer and activist Nina Simone, who spent her life trying to articulate how it might feel to be free, who spent her life trying to articulate how it might feel to be free, the ultimate Reichian dream. Like all of these people, Reich wanted a better world, and furthermore he believed it was possible. He thought that the emotional and the political impacted continually on the actual human body, and he also believed that both could be reorganised and improved, that Eden could be,

even at this late juncture, be retrieved. body what a beautiful idea despite what happened to him and despite what was happening to the movements in which he participated I could still feel that that optimism vibrating through the decades that our bodies are full of power and furthermore that their power is not despite but because of their manifest vulnerabilities beautiful right what's the book called it is called everybody who's it by it's by olivian lang who's it published by it is published by good question andy jesus fuck hang on picador it's published by Good question, Andy. Jesus. Fuck. Hang on. Picador. It's published by Canada.

Ah, Picador. There you go. We'll be back in just a sec. A book about freedom. A book about freedom. SPOILERS If you don't speak Russian, this is going to be a pretty esoteric episode. It's going to be really shit if you didn't understand any of that. Roadside Picnic is the best-known work

of Russia's most famous modern science fiction writers, Arkady and Boris Strogatsky, the authors of 26 novels and scores of short stories and plays. The book is based on the premise that Earth has been briefly visited by an alien civilization that have left behind them six points of contact across the planet, each scattered with their debris, some of it lethal to humans, all of it fascinating and perplexing. These zones, as they've come to be known, are of great interest to scientists, but also to the criminal underworld, as a black market in artefacts quickly springs up, fed by stalkers, who are prepared to risk their lives in sanity

and enter the zone to bring back the mysterious objects. The book centres on one of these, Redrick Shuhart, a tough, cynical, hard-drinking young man whose love-hate relationship with his work is driven by more than just his need for money. Considered one of the greatest of all science fiction novels, Roadside Picnic has been published in 20 countries and inspired many video games and was the basis for Andrei tarkowski's classic 1979 movie stalker so jen it was your idea that we feature roadside picnic by arkady and boris dragatsky on backlisted please tell me in the traditional manner where you were who you were when you were when you first read well actually it was quite recently so one of the years pre-covid I think about 2018 and I co-produced and sort of roadied and did everything with my friend Al Cameron for this tour called ecstatic material this is a sideline but it's it's kind of relevant and the tour was a commission that we did between an artist

called Keith Harrison, who's one of my favourite living artists in the UK, and a brilliant, brilliant musician called Beatrice Dillon. And they came together and made this thing, which was kind of this nightmarish artwork that we had to set up and pull down every night for nine nights. And it was nightmarish, and it's relevant to the book because it was these kind of big plastic industrial speakers made from industrial crates and car

speakers and they were like upturned the speakers and the speakers were full of organic materials ish so it was salt cream of tartar and basically liquid pink play-doh. We had to clean all that up every night for nine nights and then drive it to the next regional town. And the sound engineer for this tour was a guy called Alan Burgess, who's a legend in Bristol and a brilliant, brilliant man. And we just got talking about sci-fi because he reads a lot as well. And he'd said, have you read Roadside Picnic? You've got to read it you'll love it and at the time i think around this tour we were just listening to this 10 hour long version of the albatross by fleetwood mac so i associate that

song with the book as well and this pink goo which all seems to fit the kind of mood board of this book and i think it's one of the books i've recommended most to anybody since then so thanks alan well jen has listeners jen has made that thoroughly relatable yeah if your experiences relate to mine do read roadside picnic when when you mooted this idea we both both went, oh, my goodness, this is some kind of ultimate backlisted TM. But this is like a thing that we have been building up to for 169 strokes, 70 episodes. So we are so pleased to be doing this on here.

But also we're so pleased to have Ilona with us. Because Ilona, can you tell us a bit about what the Strogatzky brothers mean to you and why? Well I came to them in a sort of odd way. I was a child of the Soviet Union where science fiction was sort of slightly less censored than everything else and there was a lot more of it than everything else because it was relatively safe. And I was weaned on Jules Verne and HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. That was my first experience of science fiction, actually, which, of course, was by then historical fiction, really. And my grandmother had this collection, well, a piece of this collection that was published in the Soviet Union. It was called Adventure and Fantastica. And Fantastica covers both science fiction and

fantasy. So it was all sorts of things. And this massive series began in the 1930s, petered out in the 90s with about 280 volumes in between. And so my grandmother had about 80 of these, among all the other books that she had, were all cloth bound and I remember going literally going down the alphabet and reading them and you might ask me why the Strogatskys came after uh Jules Verne for example it's because in the Russian alphabet it's ABV and not ABC so after kind of this diet of quite ponderous Victorian science fiction, quite pulpy science fiction from the 30s and 40s, and kind of the Soviet science fiction of somebody like Ivan Yefremov, I read, I think my first one would have been Monday Starts on Saturday. And it was really like nothing else, because it was very funny. It was very funny.

It was very slangy it was very colloquial it all happened kind of in real life in modern times just with magic and science and all this kind of crazy stuff going on and then i think i went on to the uninhabited island snail on the slope which took me many many years to fall in love with because it's completely insane they thought it was their best book these authors crazy strugatsky guys crazy book and i took me a long time to fall in love with it and in the end in the end i did so they were a kind of very different science fiction to everything that i had read before and i think also in the history of kind of Soviet science fiction, Russian science fiction, they were very different as well

in their tone and in what they kind of said and who they spoke to. They spoke to kind of a generation of this young generation of Russian scientists and technicians and sort of experimenters who were very hopeful about the future and these books were of them and and for them and of course you know after the thaw finished it all went straight back to the toilet um censorship wise and everything else wise but yeah so I read the first Strogatsky's when I must have been about I would have been about seven or eight and most of it went straight over my head.

But I remember that they were so funny and so, you know, wry and ironic, and it really, really appealed to me. And I've loved them for that kind of ever since. So Roadside Picnic is 50 years old this year, right? 72, 20, 22. Is it a nostalgic experience, experience therefore going back to it the thing that I really love about it and why I wanted to talk about it is that I can never stop thinking about it and it's you know like some books become these like landmarks in your like life as a reader and

they sort of stick up further than other things and this is one that even though i probably only read it like four or five years ago it's it feels like that already and and i have this like ongoing relationship with it and maybe that relates to like the idea of the zone anyway because time changes in the zone i wondered elona whether I was amazed to discover that a lot of people seem to think it's set in Canada. And I just had always assumed... Well, I say I had always. I've only read it recently.

But I'd always assumed that this felt very much like the Soviet Union to me. The industrial landscape, the sense of kind of small town, slightly cold, lots of drinking, the amazing bar that runs through the book. It didn't feel to me, it didn't feel to me, it didn't feel like Canada, let's put it that way. I think reading it as a child, certainly that didn't feel like it was the Soviet Union, that it could have been the Soviet Union. It would have been somewhere else. The name of the protagonist, all of the English, all of the names of the people who kind of

inhabited, I think all of that felt very foreign. Whether it was Canada, I don't know, but it definitely didn't feel like it was happening on the territory of the Soviet Union. It was definitely somewhere else. And I think that was probably also done to evade the censorship. You know, if you didn't make it like home, then you could get away with saying quite a lot more. Yeah, okay.

Jin, when I read it, it felt like noir to me. It has noir elements of this strange appropriation by Russian writers of American tropes of noir, which even in the 70s would have been familiar, a kind of Chandler or Hammett universe filtered through their preoccupations and what they wanted to talk about. Yeah, it's a heist book, isn't it? Really, when you think to see. Yeah, it's like a, it's a heist. It's a heist book, isn't it? Really, when you think about it.

Yeah. So, and, but it's a heist of sort of these magical artifacts. And that's kind of, that's where the jeopardy comes in. And in that first scene, which I guess we'll sort of frame this a bit better in a minute, but that first, that first scene that you get in the zone, where they're going in to get stuff, that nothing happens in that landscape,

but it's like Rafifi levels of jeopardy within that landscape. The anxiety and the tension and the sort of, the bearing down of these invisible dangers is like overwhelming. It's incredible. And yeah, it's a heist it's a heist noir i love the idea it's a heist what i like about the idea is a heist it's a heist with insufficient information for the protagonists they're trying they're they're trying to feel their way through this thing that they don't understand, which, listen, I'm just going to read the blurb

on the back of this current Glance edition. Is that the Sci-Fi Masterworks with one of the worst covers that has ever been designed? Well, you may think that, but I can only agree. I hate this. Yeah, it's a terrible, terrible cover. Yes, I agree. I know we try and be positive on the podcast.

Somebody commissioned me to write an essay on how the sci-fi masterworks are ruining sci-fi. I think there's an inside job to ruin sci-fi for readers by putting everybody off. Anyway, that's another. Wow. That's another. Hey, suck it up, Victor Galantz.

Hey, Galantz, if you're listening. Woof. Anyway. Yeah, I'm going to read the blurb right now. Red Shoeheart is a stalker, one of those misfits who are compelled, in spite of the extreme danger, to venture illegally into the zone

to collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. Even the nature of his mutant daughter has been determined by the zone. And it is for her that he makes his last tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile territory.

They really give everything away, don't they? I mean, I think that's... Yeah, it's sort of slightly reductive, that blurb, but they're trying to kind of get you in. I think they are trying to hook you in. I don't know that I entirely agree with it either. Is it for her? Is it for her? Yeah.

I think, Jen, that's highly debatable myself, but, you know, whoever wrote this, you know, that's their interpretation. We can, you know, we can work with that. I suppose what I felt is I spent a lot of this novel thoroughly delighted, yet entirely unclear what was going on. I was gripped, but by what, I can't tell you,

because the shifting of perspectives and the willingness not to pander to what the reader might hope for really endeared it to me in a way that I'm not sure I can guarantee for everyone. But I love the idea of noir as a style that trumps sense a bit like Orson Welles' film Lady from Shanghai, which famously Harry Cohn, the head of Columbus Studios at the end of the preview screening stood up and said,

I will give $2,000 to anyone who can tell me what's just happened in the film we've watched. I feel a bit like that with Roadside Picnic. It mimics form without being enslaved to it. Ilona? The book that I was thinking of a lot when I was rereading Roadside Picnic is something that blew my mind a little bit a few years ago when I first read it, and that's Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, which also has this hyper- know, hyper object where, you know, you have this absolute

refusal on the part of the author to tell you what the fuck is going on for most of the book, and then a little bit longer. But he builds this astonishing atmosphere of dread and alienness and mystery without really ever giving you any kind of nuts and bolts about what's going on. without really ever giving you any kind of nuts and bolts about what's going on. And this is kind of, it's a kind of very science fiction thing, isn't it? Where one nutty thing is given you, one object, one alien, one thing, and everything that flows from it has to be realistic. And then you believe in that one thing.

And what Vandermeer does in Annihilation and the Strogatskys do here is they sort of say, right, we're not going to explain this because this is actually a sideways plot this is the aftermath of something it is not given you to know what any of this is what any of this means you can just you know run around like the characters do wondering why oh why and I think those two books have a lot in common I absolutely loved um all the Annihilation books and the film. And I think Vandermeer obviously, you know, is drawing a lot on this. I'm really glad you brought up Vandermeer because one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about with this book was to air my like fan theory about The Zone.

It's frightening because unlike a lot of sci-fi, you don't know what's happened and you don't understand the science and it's not given to you and nobody knows it and there's an impenetrability about it like it's not that any and I think this is where the film adaptation of Annihilation was wrong actually because nothing is out to get you you are not being chased you are just now incompatible with this ecology somehow and that is such a compelling and terrifying idea that as a human being something's happened here and you're you're no longer welcome or compatible with what's going on right yeah my fan theory at the beginning of the of roadside picnic they say there's six

zones and they're on the earth like you shot bullets, six bullets at a spinning sphere. And one's in Harmont, this fictional Canadian town that Roadside Picnic takes place in. And then my fan theory is that there is a universe of other science fiction books that happen in the same world as Roadside Picnic. And one of them is Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, which is also a zone. And Tade Thompson's rosewater trilogy which has yes kind of zones i've been thinking about other ones i don't think ryan catling's qualifies that's that's a different thing going on but there's these kind of exclusion zones where there are mutations and manipulations and it kind of makes sense for me within these all these

different worlds that the the mutations would be manifested differently in these different places with these different biologies and ecologies and stuff like that. So that's my fan theory. And I would love to hear someone map those places out on a map. There's a letter from Boris to his brother back in 1962 where he says, the novel Escape Attempt, from Boris to his brother back in 1962, where he says the novel Escape Attempt,

that this is our first work in which we felt all the sweetness and magical power of refusing explanations, which is exactly what you're all talking about. The kind of genius of this book, it seems to me, is that we don't even know if the aliens landed we just know that there is a zone and it's full of alien matter we certainly i mean you could argue we don't know whether that perhaps they're still there that's another you know we just don't know it's it's uh there's a there's a wonderful essay by stanislav lem great Polish sci-fi writer,

who's saying, you know, most of the present, until this book, most of the presentations of aliens have been, you know, they have been to some degree horrifying. And the Strigatskys completely ignore this. They don't even try, as you say, Jen, they don't even try and explain the science particularly, the sort of weird coincidences that people who've been in the zone, if they move away from the zone,

you know, a hairdresser who sets up a salon and lots of his clients in the hairdressing salon end up dying in violent deaths. It's just a, it's a very, none of it is explained. And I think that is kind of really, it's really creepy and really radical. none of it is explained and I think that is kind of really it's really creepy and really radical I really reminded me of the pre-exegesis the immediately pre-exegesis novels of Philip K Dick so the for example do androids dream of electric sheep which is filmed as blade runner which has a similar kind of noir framework to it but also Ubik and also the transmigration of Timothy Archer where you the reader are not given access to all the science or magic or whatever it is that's going on but it is framed through tropes of 20th century fiction nevertheless what i love about it actually is the the way that it is

doesn't make sense like i think the strugatskys understand dialogue in a really special way for especially for like sci-fi writers and it's quite obvious that lots of those lots of those conversations kind of come around and are looping and are full of these little dry jokes and non sequiturs and stuff like that and then and then it all takes place within these kind of social connections that not are not always explained like between red and richard noonan like you can't quite ever get a handle on what their exact relationship is and sort of the way you know there's the malteseese, young Maltese stalker who kind of comes in in the background and then, and he sort of pops up again.

And I found reading other Strugatskys after this, they just never spoon feed you ever. And I love that. I love a book that doesn't feel like it has to spoon feed you every detail. In Hard to Be a God, there's all these technologies they just name it and then they never tell you what it is you have to wait till they use it to find out what happens and i actually really love that about it it kind of gives it these incongruous details like

reading it again there's this one detail somebody's just walking down a corridor i think it's richard noonan walking down a corridor to see somebody. And he says it's got this strange smell. And it's completely irrelevant to the whole plot. Never comes up. We never find out what the smell was. It's just a place-making detail. And the sort of incongruity of it is what makes it very real and visceral. And there is a lot of sensory stuff in their writing as well.

You know, there's no clean silvery spaceships or anything. It's all mud and dirty water. Debris. Those who ran the Soviet Union had believed that they could plan and manage a new kind of socialist society. But they had discovered that it was impossible to control and predict everything and the plan had run out of control. But rather than reveal this,

the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no-one could imagine any alternative.

One Soviet writer called it hyper-normalisation. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hyper-normal. Well, that is a clip of the ever-unreliable Adam Curtis there, who we love, but you can't trust that guy either so so Ilona what do you think about what you just heard I think it's really funny because one of the things that for me the Strogatskys are really preoccupied with all the time

in most of their books is work and people doing work and scientists working on work and bureaucrats overseeing scientists working on work. And, you know, Hard to Be a God is about work. Monday Comes on Saturday is about work. And even Snail on the Slope is about work. It's about, you know, the department for the development of the forest and then the forest and the two things have nothing to do with each other um and they sort of they never meet and they have completely separate lives and so for the stragatskys i think in the mid 60s their idea their very youthful and hopeful idea of this scientific progress and and this kind of hopeful post-stalin communism, started to really crash as the thaw ended, you know, and censorship was back. And they realized that what the party was kind of saying had nothing behind it, really. It was just slogans. It was just idealism. And I think that comes out, that becomes, their work becomes

more political in a different way. And it starts to be a lot more concerned with what happens to this creative scientific minority that grows up and has got the kind of the the brakes put on them and how do they how do they deal with it and what do they do that's what it made me think of yeah you're right it's totally about work but it's not just work it's bureaucracy there's so much bureaucracy in their books and their understanding of it I think of the nuances of bureaucracy and the way people in the real world use all sorts of workarounds and have all sorts of different attitudes to how that bureaucracy impacts their own lives and operations that they make it interesting because it's about how people deal with these kind of systems, usually of paperwork or rules or allowances. Circumventing the system is a very Soviet thing.

And is there a sense in which, therefore, the activities within the zone, while dangerous, represent freedom in a way which is not accessible outside the zone? It seems to me, as a reader reader there's a kind of recklessness to the activities within the zone that are not permissible in the normal society that's being depicted. You know, freedom comes with dangers that are perhaps not available to those who don't have access to it.

And the zone is a black market. The operations in the zone is a black or a grey market. And that's kind of, you know, what gives it that noir feel as well. Jen, could you give us an example then of some of the... Yeah. ..the pros that we have in Alina Bulmashenko's translation? Yeah. I don't like the look of that tyre.

There's something wrong with its shadow. The sun is at our backs, but the shadow is stretching towards us. Oh well, it's far away from us. Anyway, everything's fine. We'll manage. But still, what could be sparkling there? Or am I imagining things?

Now, the thing to do would be to light up, sit down quietly and think it through. What's that silver stuff above the canisters? Why isn't it also beside them? Why is that tyre shadow like that? The vulture Burbridge was telling us something about the shadows which sounded strange but harmless. The shadows do funny things around here. What about that silver stuff? It looks just like a cobweb. What sort of spider could have left it behind? I've yet to see a single bug in the zone. And the worst thing is that my empty is lying right there, two steps away from the canisters. I should have just

taken it last time and then I'd have nothing to worry about. But the damn thing is so full, it's heavy. I could have managed to lift it, but to drag it on my back at night, crawling on all fours. Yeah, if you've never carried an empty, go ahead and try it. It's like lugging 20 pounds of water without a bucket. Well, should I go in? I guess I should.

A drink would sure help. It's a first contact book as well as a heist book isn't it so it's about alien first contact and about actually the fact that we won't actually know anything about anything because it's all foreign material that we can't can't analyze that and then and and there's something that they appreciate in the the workings of harm on that actually it's not just a social and cultural impacts of of something like first contact which I think Le Guin looks at really really brilliantly these these sort of social social world building within sci-fi but also that there's this like imaginary or there's this that

effect on the imagination and language as well when something like that happens like it filters down into the way we talk to each other and and the way that like a society's imagination works as well and that's what's happening in harmon like all the names none of those are real names for any of the objects the names of the objects are incredible like there's canisters in that but just in that page after you've got the hell slime and then you mentioned there's the grinder and then you've got death lamps the golden sphere bug traps space cells these kind of batteries yeah and then further on in the book there's like somebody mentions says what about these like was it lobster eyes and uh rattling napkins and there and he's like oh they're not real ones they're

just part of the mythology that's springing up I love the idea of how this kind of mythology and imaginary space I love the idea of the golden what is it, the golden ring the golden orb the thing that makes wishes come true it's such a romantic

it's the MacGuffin it's a fairy tale human thing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will still be there It's such a romantic. It's the MacGuffin. It's a fairy tale. Human thing, you know, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will still be there, you know, irrespective of whether we understand it or not. One of the things that's here is a thing that makes wishes come true. Well, maybe.

I mean, you know, it seems to me there's no guarantee. It's a threat as well, that wish granting, because it says not the wish you make, it's the wish that you desire most, that your deepest, darkest wish, the one that causes you, what is it, sleepless nights, that's what you're going to get granted. So it's threatening.

Be careful what you wish for. It's what the witch says in Into the Woods. The wish has come true, not free. Exactly. It's exactly that. Sondheim's Into the Woods. Sondheim, everybody. come true, not free. Exactly. It's exactly that. Sondheim's into the woods. Sondheim, everybody. Sondheim, everyone.

We're ringing the bell. Sondheim. Ding. But listen, maybe I should just read that little bit where there's a crucial scene where Pillman, who is the Nobel Prize winning scientist, who the Pillman Radiant, which is what jen described before these these uh six um kind of places from where the zones have been established across the the

planet he he figured it he figured out the maths to explain why they ended up where they were that they were all coming out of the direction of alpha centauri but he theni. But there's then a kind of a discussion between him and Noonan, the guy who's, as I say, working for the government, but he's also the sort of bureaucrat, but also the brothel keeper. And they have a conversation first about intelligence and about what we can infer about the intelligence of this civilization, which they don't really get much from. And then he says, well, what can you say about the visitation?

This is that passage. Certainly, said Valentine, imagine a picnic. Noonan jumped. What did you say? A picnic. Imagine a forest, a country country road a meadow a car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men bottles picnic baskets girls transistor radios cameras a fire is lit tents are pitched music is played and in the morning they leave

the animals birds and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters and what do they see an oil spill a gasoline puddle old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about scattered rags burnt out bulbs someone has dropped a monkey wrench the wheels have trapped mud from some godforsaken swamp and of course there are remains of the campfire apple cores candy wrappers tppers, tins, bottles, someone's handkerchief, someone's penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow. I get it, said Noonan, a roadside picnic. Exactly, a picnic by the side of some space road, and you ask me whether they'll come back let me have a smoke said noonan damn your pseudoscience somehow this isn't all at all how i envisioned it well that's your right observed valentine what you mean they never even noticed us why or at least paid no attention i wouldn't

get too disappointed if i were you advise valentine it's brilliant it's this idea that yeah it's just contingent they probably didn't even land. There's a long bit by Stanislav Lem saying, hey, maybe it was just a spaceship that broke up into six places and it wasn't some attempt at contact at all. It was just a random space accident. There's something so compelling about a book where we as humans are completely incidental you know yeah

yeah yeah yeah so Ilona you're a translator from Russian and there's two questions I'd like to ask you so what do you feel is the is there an element to the Strogatsky's prose that is hard to represent in English that's my first question and my second question is you've translated genre right what are the differences between translating genre and you know more orthodox literary prose to answer your first question no i don't think there's anything in the stragatskys that makes them more difficult or more special they They're great to translate. They, they're quite clear about what they're saying. You know, their dialogues are very colloquial and very funny. Um, I think they're a boon to translate. In fact, I'm always slightly sad when

I find a retranslation, a recent translation of any of their works, because I always want to do it. Uh, I think how funny they are sometimes doesn't come across, you know, but how many translations of hard to be a god you need in a century. And then the second part of your question is really, it's really interesting. The kudos and the kind of the recognition and the prizes in translation usually comes from, you know, doing serious masterworks of literature that play with form and, you know, say big things. And I'm slightly scuppered by the fact that I really love translating genre. I really love translating horror and sci-fi and historical fiction. And what I love about it is that you can be very creative because if you're translating horror, which I did a bit

of for this book that you mentioned earlier that's coming out next year, it has to be scary. Above anything else, the atmosphere matters, the mood matters. If you're translating something funny, it has to be funny. So the translator has kind of more leeway to play around with the atmosphere and kind of how they pitch things because that is as important or maybe even more important than the actual sentences than the actual words so i find translating genre a really fun um very creative process where i let myself get away with things that i wouldn't if i was translating you know tolstoy who says the same word three times in a paragraph and you better believe it's not

because he didn't know any other words. No, you're saying there's more freedom. You feel more freedom. I take more liberties and feel better doing it with genre. Yes. So publishers wanting to do horror, science fiction, you know, come to me. I take great liberties.

It'll be great. Ilona is available. Please contact us through the website. I'm available. There is a huge amount of the Strugatsky's work that isn't in English, right? You know, we're talking about how many novels there were at the start.

26, yeah. Yeah, and I think, what is there, like seven translated? Yeah, form an orderly queue. Yeah. I love it. So we're going to hear from our former guest Jeff Diner who's talking about his book Zona which is a description of his

long time relationship with Tarkovsky's film adaptation of Roadside Picnic called Stalker and what I would like to let's listen to what Jeff has to say here about what the room represents in the film versus what

the room if we even get there represents in the book the film begins as a very literal journey doesn't it for the first part you know we just follow them as they make their way to the you know through the barriers on the trolley car and then then as the film proceeds, the literal journey gives way to one increasingly either bogged down by or diverted by metaphysical questions. And that happens in the book too, until when I find myself on the threshold of the room. Well, I raise this question, I say, I talk about all these regrets I've had. And I say, is this just an English thing whereby your deepest desire is actually your biggest source of regret? And then I confide what is my greatest source of regret

and perhaps my deepest desire. No spoilers. I know what that is, but I don't want to say what that is for fear of compromising Geoff. I'd like to say to Geoff it's never too late. Why has he counted it out already? And he'd have a very witty, he'd have a very witty self-deprecating answer, I'm sure.

But he said, it's funny that in Zona, he says, Jeff goes on to say, he says, John Updike reckoned that America was a vast conspiracy to make people happy. The Soviet Russia was perhaps its equally vast antithesis. So the writer in the movie, the character in the movie, says, Has Stalker ever wanted to visit the room? Obeying the first principle of drug dealers in any and all films, don't get high on your own supply,

Stalker says no, initially in keeping with Roadside Picnic. Stalker was some kind of drug dealer or poacher. That's in the book, obviously. But as the film evolved, especially when its very existence was jeopardised by the catastrophe of ruined footage, he became a slave, a believer, a pagan of the zone. So it's this interesting thing that the film diverges from the book quite a lot, dramatically in the character of the stalker himself,

but it's still got this thing about wishful film. So I had never seen Stalker until last year. A lot of listeners will know that I watched it and read Jeff's book Zona in pretty much the same day. And it really blew me away. I really, really loved the film. But actually going to the book enhanced my understanding of the film to the extent to which one can understand that film. My knowledge of Tarkovsky is pretty patchy, in fact.

And I wondered how our guests feel about the relationship between the book, the book's reputation and the film and the film's reputation. How do you square Stalker with Roadside Picnic? I saw Stalker as a teenager going through kind of art house cinema. And I think what I realised re-watching and re-reading for this is that Red's actually a really different character in the book Red's really kind of tough and he's like a fighter and he you know he makes a playground for the monkey whereas in the film he's a bit more wimpy and he's moaning all the time and he's going oh I don't know what to do oh it's horrible and and

actually I'd forgotten that bit I just remember being taken in by the landscapes of Stalker. But in that, you know that it is the zone repeats, the zone repeated here. The zone became reality because, you know, the film and the location where they filmed Stalker, lots of people from that film set died very young, including Tarkovsky, because they were filming in this. Tarkovsky and Anatoly Solzhenitsyn, the actor who plays the writer

in the film. Because they filmed, the location where they filmed in Estonia was kind of an abandoned industrial place, but it was kind of a, you know, all that water and liquid and it was chemical waste from a factory either i read one place that said a chemical plant one place that said a paper factory and you know there's a shot in the film that looks like a kind of undulating beach almost this kind of red sandy stuff that was not absolutely that was not a setup that was real and all that kind of snowy stuff in the air that was real all the women

on set had these skin allergic reactions they were in this water all day filming everyone kind of up to their knees in this water so they they were like and yeah like you said there was this problem they used kind of a type of film that people weren't so familiar with yet and it was developed wrong and it all came out with this green hue on it so the filming process was in the zone as well you know like it repeats and there's something really sad and compelling about that yes absolutely yeah even more terrifying i found a website called chernobyl adventure which is where you can book tours to visit the site of the Chernobyl explosion. And you probably know that Reactor 4 is mentioned in the film in 1979, long before Chernobyl happened. So there's a lot of conspiracy theories around that. But it's astonishing that the people who break into the zone illegally

are known as stalkers. And it says on the website, it says stalkers can be divided into two categories. The first category is curious gamers. The second are ideological. The category of gamers include young people aged 18 to 25 who've received basic knowledge about the exclusion zone, as is around Chernobyl, from computer games and the internet. To satisfy their curiosity, they need one or two visits to the zone.

Few gamers go deep into the exclusion zone. Often they just need to visit the compulsory resettlement zone. It's just mad. It blows my mind to think that not only this book, but the film was made before Chernobyl, before exclusion zones, before any major nuclear accident. in your opinion that makes it so endlessly adaptable why are there so many foreign translations of it why does the film continue to speak to people why are there games why are there video games what are they channeling here the strugatsky brothers that speaks to us now still? They're channeling perhaps this idea of heterotopia, Foucault's idea of heterotopia, which is a kind of unreal space or a real space within another space.

So it can be a church, it can be a bazaar, it could be a hammam, it could be a graveyard, it could be a mirror, or it could be a zone, a space where things run differently, where things collide differently, where you come to terms with yourself, or maybe you don't come to terms with yourself, where you encounter yourself and other things. And it's real and it's not real. So we can project whatever we want sort of into that space. And it can be terrifying and it can project whatever we want sort of into that space and it can be terrifying and it can be beautiful and everyone has something that they can bring into that space and something that they can take back out you can play with that endlessly if you see what I mean

and that's what is so mysterious about it yeah for me your description there is what art is yeah you know the zone is art the zone is you can take or give what you ever you can and it can harm you or it can enhance you or it can change you but that's the resonance for me within it I find it very powerful they spend so much of their work talking about kind of science and experimentation and reason and intellect. What is reason for? What is intellect for? And they get really wrapped up in it as they go on. And what I find really interesting about this book is that there's some wonderful, there's a wonderful quote that they have about what reason is for, what the intellect is for.

But in the end, what you get is a character who literally says at the very end i can't think of what to say pull it out of my soul yeah and he's praying with his soul with his human soul all of this search for knowledge actually turns kind of a bit sour and it's not enough and he says i can't the literal words i can't think through this all i can do is ask you to look inside my soul and i think that's really powerful i don't know whether I was right or wrong. I guess I'll never know. But I made it.

And I guess I should be thankful for that. Nikki, how did you put that microphone inside my head? That's a very... That's sinister. Don't do that again. It's actually from a cut scene from a 2007 game called Stalker. Oh, my goodness. Stalker. Stalker.

Stalker. And with that, we must leave the zone behind. Wiser, but not necessarily happier. And offer a huge thank you to Jennifer and Ilona for guiding us through its dangers. To Nicky Birch for making us sound like we were all in the same room. And to Unbound for the plates of, and to unbound for the plates of fried sausage.

You can download all 170. 170. It's insane. Previous episodes of Batlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, batlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too.

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We'll see you in a fortnight. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much. This was so fun. Yeah. You know, we're so grateful to Ilona and to Jen

for joining us, for suggesting we read this. I'm going to leave you with one last line. Intelligence, say the Strigatskys, is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts. I love it.

Great. There you go. That's it. Pointless or unnatural acts. Be smart, people. Be smart. We love you. We'll see you next time.

Thanks, guys. Thanks very much. See you next time. Thanks, guys. Thanks very much. See you next time. Bye. Bye. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

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