Where battle drones decay and giant airships are littering the landscapes, where remaining humanity is trapped in dreams among giant neon structures on the background of slowly disintegrating Americana. Think of it as a surreal trip through alternate world California Pacifica, where something led to the collapse of the society as we know it. And that art for me perfectly hits that intersection between almost pastoral oil painting-like atmosphere and incongruous creepiness of decaying drones and rotting robots in the disintegrating desolate society, the exact place from where the unsettling dreams threaten to start. This book is highly unusual since the surreal, captivating and very unsettling magic is in the illustrations, and the story is there to illustrate the art.
#SIMON STALENHAG ELECTRIC STATE SERIES#
Providing a series of snapshots of an alternate Earth of yesteryear, it tells the story of how that world ended.“In the beginning, God created the neuron, and when electricity flowed through the three-dimensional nerve cell matrix in the brain, there was consciousness.” In the end, The Electric State is a striking and strangely compelling work of science fiction gothic.
It seems to function similarly to the paintings, there to make an impression and evoke a purely emotional response, while providing some backstory for this dying world. There is very little in way of plot or characterization, and none of the plot questions appears to be answered overall, the story is thin and even a bit flat. The result is bigger than the sum of its parts-paintings with narrative, postcards of the apocalypse.
It’s an interesting reading experience, as the artwork to an extent both takes over and provides a starting point for the reader’s imagination. The paintings provide snapshots of this apocalyptic road trip and are the main event the text illustrates the paintings far more than the other way around. Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State matches the notable Swedish artist’s futuristic digital paintings with an original story to produce an awe-inspiring vision of a species committing suicide, perhaps to be reborn as something new. And if you're anything like me, you'll take those images to bed with you for a long time and dream of Stålenhag's America - lost to sand, to drought, to war, to loneliness, and stalked always by the low, distant rumble of something terrible rising out of the earth and coming for you. Like snapshots from a horrifying past that never quite was. And when the two storylines cross, they do so in silence. On the opposite track, the history lesson becomes orders given to a mysterious man who's been following Michelle all the way to San Francisco. unwinds slowly, past, the reasons for her trip, her relationship with the little, big-headed robot revealed bit by bit. His vision of an alternate post-war, post-drought, post-human 1997 in the desert West and California. But The Electric State is Stålenhag's American book. Swedish books read joyous when they were happy, bittersweet (but rarely sorrowful) when they were not, and adventurous in between.
Feels like something brought back from a nightmare.
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