Richter ventured deep into the irradiated forests of Chernobyl and documented what perhaps is the most striking illustration of the Anthropocene—the ruins of infrastructures and ghost towns reminding of Soviet-era utopianism, the belief in progress, and new ecologies formed in the space abandoned by humans.According to Richter, the book is “a study of Chernobyl not as a dead zone where history was suddenly halted in 1986, but as a new Eden populated by scientists, settlers, and scrap-metal thieves; where hordes of tourists come by day to explore a living memorial to the fragility of civilization; and where ‘stalkers’ conduct their own nocturnal quests: rites of passage born from a blend of post-Soviet counter-culturalism, sci-fi escapism, and perhaps a yearning for spiritualistic self-discovery.”