8/31/2023 0 Comments Simon stalenhag electric state![]() 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. It unwinds slowly, her past, the reasons for her trip, her relationship with the little, big-headed robot revealed bit by bit. Michelle tells her story in stages, a few hundred words at a time, recording her impressions of blinding dust storms and convenience stores guarded by assault-rifle-toting teenagers. Or built from scrap and spare parts - shrouded in dangling cables and covered in fingers, like Lovecraftian monsters stalking strip malls and highway rest stops. The giant robots that litter the landscape are cartoony and childish. The bodies - lost to the deathless convergence of minds inside the beaked "neurocaster" headsets his Sentre junkies wear - are emaciated and skeletal, kept alive by IV drip, then by will, then by nothing but the machine. ![]() in his America, in his version of our particular sick and sweaty dream of the future - the man and the machine are one.īut State is a departure in that here - in his America, in his version of our particular sick and sweaty dream of the future - the man and the machine are one. ![]() He's got a knack for the slick sheen of biopunk grossness - all tendrils and weird fluids - and the consequent juxtaposition of humans and the machines they have made. He's always had a hacker's eye for kludging together old technology and new amid a rat's nest of cables and blinky lights. He's always done decay well, and abandonment. Stålenhag's art has always been jarring, with its combination of dull suburban tract houses, Brutalist apartment blocks, boxy economy cars and the sleek lines of pure sci-fi machinery. Because there's something inside that's very important to her, and she has to get it back. She's headed for San Francisco, or what remains of it, to a fingerspit of land poking out into the Pacific ocean, and a house there. It's the story of Michelle, a 19-year-old girl with a shotgun, a stolen car and a robot sidekick, trying to make her way across the abandoned, decaying, sandblasted and militarized American west. The other track (the larger, the more affecting) is a travelogue of sorts. It feels like something brought back from a nightmare: ![]() His newest, The Electric State, is different. They are artifacts recovered from a dream of 1980's and 90's Sweden, of a pastel suburban past littered with robots, spaceships and dinosaur bones. Stålenhag's two earlier art books ( Tales From The Loop and Things From The Flood) exist for me, in a very real way, like an alternate history of a place I've never been, but miss like a second home. I see his world in the shapes all around me. His art (photorealistic, washed out, laced in neon or icicles, nostalgic and futuristic both at the same time) gets into my eyes and stays there. The stories crawl into my brain and mess with my memory of history, time and place. Most of the time, when I read a Simon Stålenhag book, I spend days scanning the trees around my house, looking for a shudder in the leaves for the hump of a giant robot rising over the treeline, just beginning to stand. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Electric State Author Simon Stalenhag
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