Simon StålenhagCritiques

Very dark, depressing, spooky, and beautiful.

Another brilliant work, in which a seemingly advancing society still thrums with the undercurrent of a dark and mysterious past that threatens to resurface. In some ways, it's an illustration of how we can never escape the things we've made or the things we've done as a human race, even as we remove all the physical signs of its existence. In this installment we follow the narrator through the next phase of his coming-of-age journey - being evacuated from his home for three years when the decommissioned Loop floods, and exploring more of the tech-ridden landscape with new companions. The same motifs occur as in the first book, but with a new dimension: it's no longer a series of idyllic childhood expeditions but more of a growing discovery of the xenophobia and cruelty of humans, in parallel with our narrator's struggle with acceptance among his own age group.

One example that painfully struck me was "The Vagabonds", where fear ultimately decided the fate of these sentient robots which had fled one massacre in Russia... only to be rounded up a second time by the Swedish locals. And yet the robots' conduct seemed at worst simply childlike - they settled in abandoned houses, worshipping living creatures and collecting bright, soft objects out of fascination. It's yet another statement of how this world can be a cruel place, crushing those who are not prepared for it and had no choice in the matter, whether they are humans or robots, and how this cruelty may simply be a part of our nature. The narrator himself exhibits one such moment when, frustrated with an AI teddy bear that won't talk, he points a gun at it and finally receives a response.

Yet another, more horrifying dimension is added to the book when it turns out the flood might be more than just water clogging the Loop - and this is where I found some parallels to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which turned up a species of fungi that consumes radioactive material. In Things From the Flood an "unknown biological component" infects the hulking machines in a macabre and fascinating way, producing growths that look like flesh and blood and even, in some cases, entire series of limbs. Once again, as with Tales From the Loop, there's that quality that comes with anecdotes where you have no way of confirming what's true and what's false, and yet you can't help but suspect that the strangest rumors of why this happened might actually be true. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself sympathizing more with the robots than the humans, because all things considered they were created and brought into the world without a choice, and were doomed to destruction whether by human or alien hands.

On another note, the brief cyberpunk-like glimpse into city life (and the accompanying artwork) was so neatly conceived. I found the concept of vertical cities intriguing - entire megabuildings containing thousands of apartment units, with entire schools and subways on the bottom level, definitely seems like something a futuristic world would have to free up land for various purposes. The logistics of such a place would be mind-boggling but fascinating to consider. And this setting is also where the familiar phantasmagorical images of The Electric State begin to show themselves, from creepy grinning cat balloons to deceptively cheerful floating billboards. Once again I'm utterly impressed by Stalenhag's comprehensive vision of this alternate-universe dystopia, and I would love to know the process through which he created all this.

Finally, the ending seems to take us full circle - "closing the loop" as it were, even as we're reminded that what is buried does not always stay that way. The narrator returns to his home with a faint feeling of loss that he manages to shake off as the immediacy of everyday life begins to set in again. It really illustrates the fleeting nature of human memory, how quickly we can forget the darkness of our history, and I love the hints sprinkled here and there that the Loop and its mechanical children may not be completely gone.

Definitely recommending to all my sci-fi enthusiast friends!

Adding my favorite quotes to come back to later:

"Somewhere out there beyond the cordons, beyond the fields and marshes, abandoned machines roamed like stray dogs. They wandered about impatiently, restless in the new wind sweeping through the country. They smelled something in the air, something unfamiliar.
Perhaps, if we had listened closely, we would also have heard it. We may have heard the sound rising from the forgotten and sealed caverns in the depths: the muffled pounding from something trying to get out."

"In everyday life, our surroundings only shifted slowly and subtly, such as altered designs of door handles and alarm switches, a soft color change in the glow of streetlights and lightbulbs, or a new font on the signs in the subway... Each is a minor change, but often, when looking back at them all together, they are as glaringly obvious as a sudden industrial collapse."

"Change is the dynamo that slowly but inevitably drives our society forward, while past days are clouded more and more in mystery and myth. The dynamo only spins one way - there are no return tickets to the land disappearing in the mists behind us."

"In the twilight hours, it is hard to discern the details marking the passage of two decades. It is hard to separate memory from reality; my mind fills out all the blurry sections. At dusk, the field looks like an ice-covered lake. You could almost believe that the flood is back."

"They were called vagabonds. They were an odd group, and were fascinated by colorful fabric, complex patterns, fur, and feathers. Anything organic and soft was exotic and highly valuable to them, and they seemed to have developed some form of religious worship of biology and nature."

"I happened to glance out at the landscape outside the window and was struck by a brief sensation. It was a sense of something having been lost, but also a sense that I was already forgetting what it was. I shook the feeling off, turned up the volume on my stereo, and returned to more important things - in thirty minutes I was supposed to be at Martin Hagegard's party and my hair had to be just so."

"Somewhere deep within the bedrock, where the nation kept its radioactive waste and where only machines labored, there were now endless rows of echo spheres filled with concrete. If we had been able to linger there without being incinerated by the radiation, and if we had been able to put our ear to the spheres, we might have heard it - the nervous heartbeats of something in there, slumbering restlessly."

A hauntingly beautiful and visceral work of art that once again reminds me what a privilege it is to walk through this artist's imagination.

The book reads like a series of vignettes interspersed with illustrations that made my heart ache for a world I never lived in. Some of the paintings have such a dreamlike quality, with hazy edges as though remembered distantly, from a childhood long ago - so that even as they depict moments of childhood against the forbidding technology of the Loop, they still remain so human and nostalgic. It made me think of my own childhood and the bleak landscape that it was set in; the stories speak to the resilience, adaptiveness, and even optimism of children in their ability to seek out things that give their lives meaning even in a dystopian environment.

In other words, this is a remarkable instance of how pictures can be worth a thousand words, but also how a few words can tell us so much about humanity and about ourselves. Stalenhag is phenomenal at depicting how small we are against our enormous, magnificent and terrifying creations, either as extensions of ourselves or manifestations of our lofty goals - and yet there are some things that, just as the description states, are instantly recognizable. The ebb and tide of human life continues in spite of the constant danger and disturbance, and we are presented with an eclectic cast of characters illustrating the different ways people react to the unknown. A touch of the macabre here and there makes it all unforgettable.

And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't admire the science behind the science fiction. I love the interspersed snippets that read like little ads or informational blurbs, as well as the strange rumors that are never fully confirmed or discredited. The vast mystery of the Loop and its effects on space-time; aerial travel via the magnetrine effect; artificial nervous systems and sentient machines that are sometimes as lost as the humans in this alternate universe. ("The Escapee" particularly tugs at my heartstrings and I would love to see the side of the story from one of these robots.) The possibility of time travel, both for us and for creatures that came before us (the dinosaurs come to mind, along with the giant two-legged robots that look, walk and turn in ways strangely reminiscent of them). And then there is Nature slowly but surely reclaiming what is left of our abandoned forays. One of the final pieces of art accurately illustrates just that - the end of a technological age in a bleak landscape of man-made structures, broken-down humanoid robots sitting in disarray beneath gray skies.

I could probably go on for hours about the thoughts and emotions that this work invoked, but I'll simply end with some quotes that stuck with me:

"Small flares of light swarmed above the mounting around the tower. They danced in the cold air, emitting soft siren calls that echoed in the valley."

"Some days are like jittery, malicious clockwork -- sometimes things freeze mid-movement and we age several years in a few seconds."

"Suddenly, our machines were bestowed balance and grace previously reserved for biological organisms."

"I remember at the end of August, when the vacationers started to migrate back into the city and the guest pier was deserted, you could hear the distant breaths of the vane turbines rise and fall under the water, like monotonous whale songs in the chilly water."

"A moist mass of cardboard boxes, pillows, and mattresses had erupted from the front door, like the house was vomiting forth its stomach contents."

"If I look at my memories from the side, that weekend is a black line, like the dark boundary in the rock layers left by the disaster that killed all the dinosaurs."

"A new and dark inner landscape had opened up, and we wanted nothing more than to talk about it. We abdicated from childhood, tried to learn how to talk as adults, and shamefully glanced back at our playgrounds."

"... and then we returned to our old playgrounds like zombies around a mall. We sat wedged into the swings outside the school, or crouched in someone's old treehouse, smoking stolen cigarettes."

"We walked in long lines through winter nights, and you could see little points of light go on and off in the darkness - cigarettes smoked by teenagers who had gathered around their wrecked memories, like a requiem.
We made our nights our days, squinted at the horizon, and sighed. Way over there, the morning dawned."

An unforgettable book that will always have a place on my bookshelves.

"Maybe you don't even put it into words, but we both know that you're thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost."

But do we really have souls? Or are we just endlessly programmable creatures whose code can be cracked even if the entirety of our minds have not been mapped yet? Psychological studies might point to the latter, and so does The Electric State - because even though the human brain and its composition are still hardly understood in the 90s, Sentre's neurocasters provide enough access to the psyche for a hive mind to form through thousands of smaller connected ones. It's terrifying and yet somewhat unsurprising that this might be the culmination of all our advances, which has been called many names before and done many different ways: mob mentality, folie ? plusieurs, mass hysteria, and even 'sheeple.'

After reading this a second time, with the actual hardcover edition before me, and with Tales From the Loop and Things From the Flood under my belt, I gained a new love for this story - and, as usual, can't say enough times how brilliant it is. Darkly beautiful imagery is juxtaposed with a young woman's memory of her own imperfect, depressing but still human and sometimes nostalgic past, to which she can never return. An unknown narrator (who I highly suspect is Michelle's mother in a nonhuman form) also makes her presence known with memories of the drone war and how the hive mind arose. And we make a return once again to the towering architecture and robotic creatures that make Stalenhag's art so distinctive.

Unpacking this digital apocalypse uncovers so many layers for me:

(1) Virtual reality as an escape from everyday life - Reminds me of the consistency principle from Robert Cialdini's Influence, of which one branch states that people are often wired to keep going on autopilot rather than face difficult problem-solving situations; as a result, they are automatically pushed towards poor life choices. It's a growing epidemic in the digital age, with people taking more and more to virtual/fictional settings as a safe haven, stunting their intellectual growth to satisfy momentary impulses. And we rarely stop and think about the fact that pretty much every aspect of our lives is already directed in some way by a few big companies. In the same way that so many people are marketed unhealthy food and recreational practices (alcohol, cigarettes, etc.) without ever being fully conscious that this is what's killing them - the Sentre consumers are so hooked on their neurocasters that they never even realize they're drowning, or being eaten alive. Thus Stalenhag's dark vision of so-called advancements taking over our lives reads much like a well-timed warning.

(2) "The Intercerebral Divinity" / "oily god" - I found it interesting that such an alien creature was compared to a god, in the same vein as the ultimate supercomputer in Fredric Brown's "Answer". To me, this all goes back to the fact that since the beginning of time, humans have always been searching for that something more to believe in - whether it's a single god or many, or unnamed invisible forces directing our every move, like the red thread of fate. Because life is harsh and either has so many or so few choices as to make us feel powerless, as a species we look for solace in a higher being to guide our actions and distinguish right and wrong. But what if such a being truly and irreversibly appeared before us? What would it look like, what would it do, and would we ever be free or would we be slaves to its higher authority/intelligence? While it seems that Stalenhag's hive mind was an accidental byproduct of many people connected to the same network, this one passage says a lot about the entire dynamic:

"And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy."

Perhaps, despite never consciously asking for it, these people are happy because they finally have something to follow, because driving change as leaders and revolutionaries is hard, because life is so much more simple when judge, jury and executioner are all provided for you. And that's a scary thought, but history provides the proof.

(3) Actions of the hive mind / the air force pilots as "termites" - This line really struck me, as it called to mind the uncanny similarities between eusocial insect behavior and that of the interconnected neurocaster users. I have to wonder how much direct inspiration Stalenhag drew from nature, as these are some of the common elements:

(i) A "queen" around whom all the activities of the hive/colony are centered - the role played by the Intercerebral Divinity.
(ii) Drones (often male) whose purpose is to reproduce, and can sometimes break off from the main group to start their own colonies - the various hulking cobbled-together robots who started roaming the land after the hive mind arose. And, either coincidentally or not, they are also called drones.
(iii) Workers who build and maintain colony structures, and are also infertile - calling to mind the air force pilots with their stillborns, who built the giant robotic creature that allowed the Intercerebral Divinity to take physical form.
(iv) Satellite nests - several eusocial insect species build interconnected nests, which remind me of the way enormous neurograph towers stretch across cities and are constantly being expanded by cable-roller robots.
(v) Another name for these insect societies is "superorganisms" because they operate as a coherently functioning whole.

All in all, this is a grotesquely beautiful work that is sure to present new shades of meaning every time I come back to it. Its genius lies in its ambiguity, forcing us to think instead of falling into the same trap as the followers of the hive mind.

Some quotes worth remembering:

"The drone technology was praised because it spared us meaningless loss of life. The collateral damage was of two kinds: the civilians unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire, and the children of the federal pilots, who, as a concession to the godheads of defense technology, were all stillborn."

"May is the time of dust. Gusts of wind rise and ebb through the haze, carrying huge sheets of dun-colored dust that seethe and rustle across the landscape. They slither across the ground, hissing among the creosote bushes and on until piling up in billowing dunes and waves that wander unseen and grow in the constant static."

"Lighthouse keepers were once warned they shouldn't listen to the sea for too long; likewise, you could hear voices in the static and lose your mind."

"It was as if there were a code in there - a code that could, as soon as your mind detected it, irrevocably conjure demons from the depths."

"Do you know how the brain works? Do you have any idea of what we know about how the brain and consciousness work? Us humans, I mean. And I'm not talking about some new-age hocus-pocus, I'm talking about the sum of the knowledge compiled by disciplined scientists over three hundred years through arduous experiments and skeptical vetting of theories. I'm talking about the insights you gain by actually poking around inside people's heads, studying human behavior, and conducting experiments to figure out the truth, and separating that from all the bullshit about the brain and consciousness that has no basis in reality whatsoever. I'm talking about the understanding of the brain that has resulted in things like neuronic warfare, the neurographic network, and Sentre Stimulus TLEs. How much do you really know about that?"

"I suppose you still have the typical twentieth-century view of the whole thing. The self is situated in the brain somehow, like a small pilot in a cockpit behind your eyes. You believe that it is a mix of memories and emotions and things that make you cry, and all that is probably also inside your brain, because it would be strange if that were inside your heart, which you've been taught is a muscle. But at the same time you're having trouble reconciling with the fact that all that is you, all your thoughts and experiences and knowledge and taste and opinions, should exist inside your cranium. So you tend not to dwell on such questions, thinking 'There's probably more to it' and being satisfied with a fuzzy image of gaseous, transparent Something floating around in an undefined void."

"Maybe you don't even put it into words, but we both know that you're thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost."

"When we fell asleep, the car was engulfed by howling darkness. It rocked in the wind, and I dreamed I slept inside the belly of a giant."

"The car moved through the pitch-black desert night like a submarine in a deep-sea trench."

"I looked around. We were all alone.
'Where are your mom and dad?'
'Everywhere,' the boy replied."

"Afterward, I was curled up on the ground and saw the pink chunks spread across the flagstones around me, and before Fort Hull's alarm system started blaring I had the time to think: That's it, right there! The recipe for bechamel sauce. But even if I did my utmost to scoop up the pieces and put them back in the pit that used to be Max's skull, his recipe would still be lost. Max's lasagna existed in the intricate way those pink chunks had been assembled, just like love and hate and anxiety and creativity and art and law and order. Everything that makes us humans something more than elongated chimpanzees. There it was, spilled across the flagstones, and no technology known to man could ever put it back together. It was incredible."

"That was my materialistic revelation. What I'm trying to say is that what we call lasagna is simply a phenomenon that arises somewhere between the physical parts of the brain and in the way they're put together, and anyone claiming lasagna is something more has underestimated how complicated the brain is and in how many ways its parts can be assembled. Or they have overestimated the phenomenon of lasagna."

"The view outside the window made me uneasy. After three weeks in the Blackwelt badlands, where visibility never went beyond a few hundred yards, we were suddenly distinct in the great void, the car crawling like a black bug across a vast sheet of white paper."

"Hey, girl, I said, and the horse pricked up its ears and turned its head toward me, and where her eyes should have been there were only two dark pits."

"On the side of the building there was a Sentre ad, and I assumed the whole installation must have been theirs. I guess there must have been millions of minds bouncing around inside that thing, and the power required to please them melted the snow."

"Someone should really heave those installations from their foundations and let them roll down the mountains into the suburbs, where they could crush whatever was left of all the gardens, houses, and responsible mothers and fathers and their SUVs and finally lay themselves to rest in the abandoned city centers as memorials to humankind."

"In the beginning, God created the neuron, and when electricity flowed through the three-dimensional nerve cell matrix in the brain, there was consciousness."

"There was something going on with her mouth. It moved like the mouth of someone dreaming, and it didn't stop moving until later, when Ted took the neurocaster off and she finally died."

"Once upon a time, these kinds of ships had been the pride of the federal army... Now, here they were, plucked out of the sky, hollowed out and chewed up by the sea, and finally back in service as cliffs for birds to roost on. Behold the Amphion, the pride of the air force: ten million tons of rust and bird shit."

"I have to say: they were fantastic. Something inside me wanted to stop the car and get out, to walk up to them and touch them and closely examine every single one of these strange growths. In another reality I would have loved this. I would have calmly walked these streets, fascinated - certainly with a degree of disgust, but rapturous, pleasant disgust. In the real world, everything was backward now. We were the fascinating growth, the insane - the only sick souls in a healthy world. There was no safe everyday life behind us, no normal zone to return to, and the only way out was forward."

A gift from my son, this graphic novel is both a beautiful and gripping apocalyptic story.

I can't properly review the three books in this series because they are art books, and it is a matter of sinking deep into the illustrations after you were told what they are about.

The narrative of this Stålenhag book is quite different from his others. It echos the others, in particular, [b:Things from the Flood|31094296|Things from the Flood|Simon Stålenhag|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1468380755l/31094296._SX50_.jpg|51698723] in its themes of lonely and strange landscapes. This book has a straightforward narrative and is clear about the horror that humans face in their fight for survival. It packs a punch.

I definitely have to reread this one. Probably today.

This hauntingly beautiful book lies somewhere in between a graphic novel and an illustrated novella. Whatever else it may be, it is incredible.

The art is magnficent. I would be happy simply looking through a book of these pictures. However, Simon Stålenhag has also given us a mysterious, retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic road trip story that has left me with as many questions as it has given me answers and a deep longing to return to this universe.

Right off the bat, to be fair, I read this book as an e-book on my laptop, so the glorious artwork couldn't possibly be appreciated as much as reading a physical copy of the book. The e-book didn't allow me to enlarge the photos at all, so I was seeing this amazing stuff three inches wide. But the artwork is lovely - decayed technological weirdness in an American dystopia. The snippets of writing were also little bits of weirdness -- reminding me of the stilt people that are just casually passed by in Mad Max: Fury Road -- the viewer is wondering what the hell that just was. The snippets also get quite dark! My main problem with it is that the book is so short.. I want more words and artwork from this unique world. I wonder if or why hasn't Stalenhag ever created videogames with this artwork. I would set this on the shelf beside 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline and 'FKA USA' by Reed King.½

Big book, fascinating colour illustrations throughout with a story told in words and pictures. The story of a teenage boy growing up in a place devastated by a technological disaster, with rogue AI robots, poisoned water supplies, evacuation, domestic abuse, school bullying, mysterious organic growths feeding off the debris, etc. And yet the story is beautiful, the boy finds it exciting, makes friends, plays a lot, explores no-go zones, helps a friend to build amazing machines from collecting and repairing the defunct parts strewn across the landscape, has his first kiss and cigarette; and the government takes real action in decontaminating the land.

Futuristic story told with a mixture of words and pictures, about a young woman travelling across America, the land devastated by war, and the population addicted to virtual reality headsets "Neurocaster". Her brother manages to contact her through his VR headset which connects to a Robot "Kid Kosmo", and leads her to where he awaits help. Beautiful open-ended story of sibling love and courage. Amazing colour illustrations throughout. One of the characters interestingly, suffered from galactorrhoea (milk production) as well as his addiction.

Amazingly creative and at times downright creepy. Loved it.

Surreal. You’ll keep asking yourself, how did I never know about this history? Then shaking your head and remembering it’s not real.

This sequel was a little more disturbing, just so you know.

2023 book #36. 2014. The memories of a boy growing up near a fictional giant particle accelerator in Sweden in the '80s and the weird technological artifacts in the area. Mostly haunting drawings. The basis for a series on Amazon in 2020 which I started watching but didn't finish

LOVE this.

A fascinating tale of a parallel history or alternate history. Gorgeous and dreamy artwork.

Necesito encontrar este libro en fisico.½

Wow.

Although this has the same wonderful artwork (full-page, often double-page), The Electric State differs from Stålenhag’s first two books in that it’s not set in his native Scandinavia and doesn’t appear to be anything to do with the “Loop”, the giant particle-accelerator ring under the Swedish countryside. It also lacks their nostalgic feel—here in fact, while we are again seeing the world through the eyes of a teenager, this teenager has had a horrible time of it and the world itself is in the process of unravelling around her.
    There’s more of a conventional narrative too. The year is 1997 and we’re in the southwestern USA as Michelle and her little robot Skip head west out of the Blackwelt Exclusion Zone, across the state line into Pacifica and then on through the Sierra Nevada mountains making for the coast. She’s armed with a shotgun, avoids main highways and cities. The landscapes are littered with grounded attack ships and rusting combat robots, the winding roads themselves largely deserted—although not as a result of the recent war. Much as television followed radio, so neurocasters are replacing TV: supplied by a company called Sentre, these are headsets which pick up virtual-reality broadcasts beamed from the huge neurograph towers now looming up into the sky everywhere; and after an upgrade the previous year, people are becoming addicted to this virtual world. In suburban homes they starve to death sitting on their own couch, neurocasters on, lips twitching like dreamers. That’s how Michelle got the Oldsmobile she’s driving: it was parked beside a desert road, doors wide open and its two elderly occupants sprawled nearby, headsets still in place. Later, they come upon a crew of road-workers and their rig, the work stalled half-done, all three in their fluorescent orange jackets with headsets on, oblivious.
    This is what’s happening everywhere, the USA itself stalling in mid-stride as people abandon themselves to the virtual world. Through this eerie alternative-present Michelle guides the car—not aimlessly, but towards Point Linden to the north of San Francisco. Her little robot is the key: it gets tired like a child, reads comic-books like a child, but once you suddenly understand what Skip really is and why Michelle is crossing the mountains, it’s a hugely touching story.
    I’m bowled over, have become a complete fan. Stålenhag’s books have captured my imagination like nothing else I’ve read since I was a teenager myself.

Kirjan kuvitus on jotakin aivan uskomatonta. Kuvat kertovat tarinaa siinä missä sanatkin. Tarina itsessään on jonkin verran hämmentävä, mutta se ei haittaa. Tää on uskomaton.

"It has no plot, it's absolute dystopia, and it is so awesome!" - Areg

Areg picked this up at the library after reading about it online. It is, indeed, awesome in a sense of inspiring awe. Stalenhag accompanies his linear-with-nonlinear-flashbacks-and-a-side-narrator novella with gorgeous artwork of sweeping, epic, often ugly and ruined landscapes. While the story might almost stand on its own without the art--there are just a few things that really require a visual to understand what's going on--it absolutely enriches the experience, showing us things that have become so common lace that they don't get mentioned in the text, and juxtaposing the bizarre, jarring forms of man-made machinery and architecture with surprisingly pristine natural beauty. Included maps reveal place names both new and familiar and show us how the invisible boarders of states and counties have been rewritten.

It's an alternate 1997, in a California that's been reshaped by a massive war. Michelle is a young woman who we first meet wandering across a dusty desert wasteland, followed by a bright, toy-like robot/done that has a kayak in tow. She and Skip find a car abandoned by its owners--who have died beside it, in thrall to the virtual reality head sets that their corpses still wear--and make their way through emptying towns, lawless ruins, and cities. Massive abandoned and crumbling suspension (air) ships litter the land, drones wander the wilderness maintaining the giant hubs that connect millions of VR sets, and along the way are thousands of emaciated dead, near-dead, and zombie-like VR headset users.

Michelle keeps Skip entertained with comics and music, and reflects on her fragmented life, moving roughly backwards in time with occasional hops around. After her father died in the war, her mother worked for the army repairing drones and ships, stealing and taking as drugs the chemicals that make the massive things move. When her mother dies, Michelle moves in with her grandfather for a few years, though his work at at a suspension-building plant gives him cancer that claims his life. Social workers stick Michelle with foster parents she hates; as they succumb to the lure of the neuro/VR headsets and neglect her, she makes friends and falls in love...until her girlfriend's father, a minister for the Convergence, takes his daughter away for reeducation. As everyone around her leaves--physically or through VR, which Michelle can't experience due to an eye condition--Michelle almost gives up in despair...until Skip shows up one day, with a map and an address, and Michelle sets off on her trek.

Meanwhile, we hear about the brutality of the war from an unidentified (former?) soldier, who talks about the advances in neurotechnology that powered drones, suspensions, and VR experiences through combined neural power. Some people, who form a religion known as the Convergence, believe that the sheer amount of neural power coalesced into a new entity capable of creation. The technology had consequences: all the babies in the suburb that housed the army's drone operators are stillborn...and when soldiers investigate why the operators have stopped responding to calls, they discover what kind of collective creation is happening.

Some may be frustrated by the many unanswered questions in The Electric State. Who is our soldier narrator now, and what do they want? Once Michelle reaches her final destination, what is her goal? Where, exactly, is she planning to go next with what she's found? But the open-endedness is part of what makes The Electric State fascinating.

Definitely worth a read for those interested in science fiction, cyberpunk, and sci-fi art.

This is my third Stålenhag read, after Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood, and is the same combination of full-page artwork interspersed with text. Unlike those, though, The Labyrinth is a narrative too.
   It’s also much darker (in both senses of the word). The Earth’s surface has finally become uninhabitable, its atmosphere choked with ammonia and other toxins pumped into it by the mysterious black spheres which have been appearing in the sky for a decade. Perhaps this is some unknown natural phenomenon, or the prelude to an alien invasion? In the “Loop” books though, particularly towards the end, sentient machines and weirder things were seen coming up from the decommissioned, and now derelict, particle-accelerator ring beneath the Swedish countryside—and the landscape in this book does look like a post-apocalyptic Scandinavia, so I think that’s where we still are here, but a couple of decades further on.
   The narrator is Sigrid, recently returned from an expedition up to the planet’s surface together with her brother Matt and a troubled teenager called Charlie, from Kungshall, a self-contained underground town constructed to house the remnant Swedish population. Their destination had been Granhammar, one of the surface stations; and from there they drove out into the appalling landscape to take readings and collect samples. In the near-darkness there are glimpses of ruined apartment blocks, giant alien-looking plants and a greenish sun showing through the ammonia cloudbanks; the landscapes are dunes of ash and the leaning trunks of dead spruce trees. It was back at the surface station, though, that the culmination of a more personal tragedy unfolded.
   I know what it is I love about Stålenhag’s books. There’s the stunning artwork obviously; also the concept, the simple idea behind the Loop. But they’re also so understated—the very opposite of an overblown Hollywood SF-film for instance—and that’s particularly true of The Labyrinth.

Simon Stålenhags senaste bok, Labyrinten, är betydligt dystrare än tidigare: här är det inte en vemodig blick på en barndom i en värld fylld med underliga maskiner: berättaren är vuxen, och även om en av de tre huvudpersonerna är tonåringen Charlie så är denne den minst genomskinlige: berättaren Sigrid och hennes bror Matte pratar med varandra och läsaren, Charlie verkar mest trulig.

Dysterheten kommer dock främst från den askbleka framtiden: märkliga svartglober har nått jorden, och de har omvandlat den till en värld fylld av aska och ammoniak. Ytan är förgiftad, men i Kungshall överlever en spillra mänsklighet. I bunkern hoppas de kunna ta klara sig genom fördärvet, fram till dess jorden möjligen en dag kan bli beboelig igen.

Sigrid, Matte och Charlie skall dock lämna huvudbunkern en tid för att bege sig till en utpost och ta prover på vad som försiggår däruppe. Sigrid och Matte för att det är deras arbetsuppgifter, Charlie för att hans tonårskris verkar djupare än andras och ombytet kanske kan vara till nytta. Det går åt helvete.

Jämfört med tidigare böcker finns här mindre av underliga manicker, konstiga varelser och extravaganta byggnader: visst, Kungshall har tillgång till stora svävande luftfarkoster, och det finns lämnor efter stora robotar som användes under de sista desperata dagarna av liv på ytan: men de står ofta i bakgrunden och ses genom ett grått eller grönt dis, och många av bilderna skulle kunna vara avbildningar av tråkiga svenska företagslokaler anno 1997. Det är dock en mer sammanhållen berättelse, och väldigt lite skulle kunna tas bort.

I can't get enough of these books. Stålenhag manages to capture what the world was like in my head. I know all of this takes place completely outside Canada, but honestly, the landscape, the snow, the lighting, the entire 70s vibe mixed with all the robots and dinosaurs and weird, reality-bending machines calls up what I wanted every trip away from the family home to be.

In my mind, this was my world.

The storyline that Stålenhag creates perfectly captures what's going on in the images, and adds to it. And I have to say, the Amazon TV series managed to completely capture the same feel.

Excellent stuff.

So, now I know a little more of what to expect from Simon Stålenhag. I stumbled across [b:The Electric State|36836025|The Electric State|Simon Stålenhag|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1512342315l/36836025._SX50_.jpg|58608377] and instantly fell in love with it. Then I watched and equally loved the Tales From The Loop...having absolutely no clue there was actually a book that it was based on (I honestly thought it was from the paintings in Electric State, which illustrates precisely how...ahem...out of the loop I am).

Anyway, I still haven't got my hands on a copy of [b:Tales from the Loop|27404461|Tales from the Loop|Simon Stålenhag|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1447796125l/27404461._SX50_.jpg|43658818], but it's absolutely a priority, after reading this second installment in what happened in that strange area of Sweden.

I think I only rated this one a four, as once the central impact of Stålenhag's paintings hit you, from then on there's less shock and awe, but still admiration and wow factor. The vignettes work well with the pictures, but I found myself almost wanting to know more about what's going on in the paintings, while at the same time enjoying the opportunity to let my own mind fill in the missing details.

Either way, gorgeous book, and a must read.