Futuristic Dreams Turn To Nightmare In 'Electric State'
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.
Most of the time, I see them everywhere.
His books infect me that way. The stories crawl into my brain and mess with my memory of history, time and place. 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. For a while, and ) 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. 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.
