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The Electric State (2017)

par Simon Stålenhag

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3411775,375 (4.28)2
"A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Ready Player One and Black Mirror. In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her small yellow toy robot travel west through a strange American landscape where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system. As they approach the edge of the continent, the world outside the car window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in"--… (plus d'informations)
  1. 00
    Descendre en marche par Jeff Noon (dtw42)
    dtw42: Desperate road trip in a neurologically degenerating society.
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"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."


( )
  Myridia | Jan 19, 2024 |
A gift from my son, this graphic novel is both a beautiful and gripping apocalyptic story. ( )
  markm2315 | Jan 1, 2024 |
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. ( )
  Zoes_Human | Nov 20, 2023 |
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. ( )
  booklove2 | Nov 11, 2023 |
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. ( )
  AChild | Aug 31, 2023 |
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"A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Ready Player One and Black Mirror. In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her small yellow toy robot travel west through a strange American landscape where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system. As they approach the edge of the continent, the world outside the car window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in"--

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