Jason Pettus's Reviews > The Electric State

2022 reads, #22. Earlier this year I checked out two library books by Swedish illustrator and writer Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions of "future trash" have been popular viral hits at the various social networks for an entire decade now, and whose debut book Tales from the Loop (my review) blew me away once I learned that, far from being a futuristic story, his paintings were meant to illustrate an abandoned Cold War Scandinavian research facility that never was, and that the story itself is actually a tender childhood memoir by an adult in the 21st century looking back at his 1990s youth spent among the decaying robots and half-collapsed maglev ships. Now, months later, I've finally gotten around to reading the other book of his the Chicago Public Library owns, and it blew me away all over again, and once again because the story accompanying the paintings was completely unexpected and much better than it has any right to be.

This time a more straightforward thriller, it tells the tale of an apocalyptic event that happened soon before the events of our own book, nebulous in nature but having something to do with virtual reality goggles, an Apple-like all-consuming tech giant, and the systematic environmental collapse of America's west coast (whose landmarks Stålenhag cleverly renames just to make things even more surreal; so in the world of The Electric State, for example, the state of California is actually known as "Pacifica"); and we are basically following a teenage girl and her robot companion as she attempts to navigate the dangerous back roads of a now fully anarchic Southern Pacifica (think Los Angeles) to hopefully find a refuge she's heard rumors of near the north end of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Like Tales from the Loop, the written story here is just as important and just as impressive as the overwhelmingly beautiful paintings that accompany them; and in fact the one and only complaint I have (and it's not really much of a complaint at that) is that it's difficult to read an entire novella's worth of text when holding a giant oversized 11 x 17 book like the format this hardcover was first published as. Other than that, this was just as profound and moving a storytelling experience as his other book was, and I have to admit that Stålenhag is one of the only 21st-century artists I've come across whose original work I would love to collect (and that I bet is nearly impossible to do so, because he's become so hugely popular among the online crowd over the last decade). Do yourself a big favor and pick up any of his books when you have a chance, this one recommended just as much as any of the others.