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    The Electric State
    The Electric State
    The Electric State
    Ebook140 pages54 minutes

    The Electric State

    By Simon Stålenhag

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    *Soon to be a Netflix film starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt*

    A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Stranger Things 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9781501181436
    The Electric State
    Author

    Simon Stålenhag

    Simon Stålenhag (b. 1984) is the internationally acclaimed author, concept designer and artist behind Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. His highly imaginative images and stories depicting illusive sci-fi phenomena in mundane, hyper-realistic Scandinavian and American landscapes have made Stålenhag one of the most sought-after visual storytellers in the world. Tales from the Loop was ranked one of the “10 Best Dystopias” by The Guardian, along with such works as Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca.

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    Reviews for The Electric State

    4.5/5

    98 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A girl and her robot travel to the California coast while civilization slowly crumbles in a dystopian 1997. Surely this is an appealing premise for sci-fi enthusiasts. Unfortunately, the novelty wears off very quickly. You get treated to a succession of digital West Coast landscapes, invariably featuring the back of an Oldsmobile and some colossal electromechanical structure in the background. A blue hue is overused in *every single image* to convey sadness, dread and pessimism.The accompanying narration is linear and underwhelming. The protagonist is an unrelatable, borderline sociopathic, anachronistically millennial teenager. She enumerates generic West Coast place names. "We drove along Canyon Lane past Cedar Woods, Woodrington Heights and Coast Terrace trying to reach El Rancho before heading off to El Mezcalito". Repeat on every single page. All toponyms are entirely fictional, so even if you are from California, that won't add any relevant information. Nothing really happens and the pace quickly changes from what we may at best call brisk to glacial. We find out very little about this world, how it works, what has happened, when, why. We don't get any clues to answer these questions ourselves in our imagination either. There's also the cliché teenage angst about foster parents and failed romance. The book is marketed as a tour de force travelogue across a cyberpunk phantasmagoria, in a world similar to ours that took a wrong turn somewhere in the early 1990s. But it really is an oversized collection of postcards with a one-dimensional, poorly written narration on the side.To finish on a positive note, this could make a wonderful TV series if the basic concept is put in the hands of a capable screenwriter who can spin the story into an action-packed suspense/drama/road movie. Stalenhag certainly is a talented artist with some original ideas, but he would benefit from the help of a more entertaining storyteller next time. He could also add more variety and some spice into his art. It's all very static, scenic and scripted. Probably not enough to drive a narrative on its own. A succession of decently crafted images a good story does not make.
    • 5/5
      Wow....just wow. Fantastic story, and great art. I am shook
    • 4/5
      A really beautifully illustrated hardback art book this time looking at a dystopian post future war setting on the west coast of America. Largely concentrating on a road trip with some references to what has gone before this is evocative stuff. It’s accessibility is improved by amazing illustrations. If you like Tales From The Loop then I’d be very surprised if you won’t be captivated by this.
    • 5/5
      This darkly 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.
    • 4/5
      Part graphic novel, part dystopian coming-of-age story, with a sprinkle of "The Road" thrown in, this illustrated novella was unlike anything I'd ever read before, and I very much enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Thanks to NetGalley & Edelweiss for the ARC. Stunning artwork. Absolutely thoroughly imagined and jaw dropping artwork set to classic and engaging sci-fi themes. Simon Stalenhag has put together, yet again, a totally engrossing and compelling art-book set to vignette stories. Pairs well with: Dinotopia - primarily because of the short form fiction work put up against stellar illustrations. Pamphlet Architecture. The entire series but mainly works from Lebbeus Woods and Zaha Hadid.Borne, Dead Astronauts, and Strange Bird - Jeff Vandermeer for visualizations of the broken places.

    Book preview

    The Electric State - Simon Stålenhag

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    They’d put us on a railroad

    They’d dearly make us pay

    For laughing in their faces

    And making it our way

    There’s emptiness behind their eyes

    There’s dust in all their hearts

    They just want to steal us all

    And take us all apart

    But not in

    Love my way, it’s a new road

    I follow where my mind goes . . .

    So swallow all your tears, my love

    And put on your new face

    You can never win or lose

    If you don’t run the race . . .

    The Psychedelic Furs,

    Love My Way, Forever Now, 1982

    The war had been fought and won by drone pilots—men and women in control rooms far from the battlefields, where unmanned machines fought each other in a strategy game played over seven years. The pilots of the federal army had lived a good life in brand-new suburbs where they could choose from thirty kinds of cereal on their way home from work. 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.

    MOJAVE DESERT, PACIFICA, USA

    SPRING 1997

    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.

    I DIDN’T HEAR the wind anymore. My shoulders ached from carrying the heavy shotgun, and my feet worked mechanically, as if they didn’t belong to me. My thoughts were meandering away into a daydream: I thought about Ted under the beach umbrella in Soest as he lay there with large colorful birds in his arms and dreamed of something. His mouth was moving.

    I noticed something soft inside my mouth. I stopped and spat out a gray lump of rubbery saliva. Skip came up to me and looked at the lump on the ground. It looked like a furry caterpillar. I stomped on it and tried to smear it into the sand, but only managed to roll it out into a long string of spaghetti. Skip looked at me.

    It’s the dust, I said.

    I took my water bottle out of my backpack, rinsed my mouth, and spat a few times. When I put my pack back on, I saw something in the distance: a pink piece of cloth protruded from a sand dune, billowing in the wind like a small parachute. I walked over and poked it with my foot. It was a pair

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