After two books being set in an alternate Sweden, Stålenhag jumps across the pond and tells a story of a girl and her robot trying to make it across the southwestern United States to San Francisco, as society, hit by the horrors of a civil war and unable to recover, crumbles around them.
ISBN: 9789187222696
Fria Ligan, 2017-12-04
Swedish and English
- Editions
- The Electric State
English edition by Simon and Schuster / Saga Press
ISBN: 9781501181412
- The Electric State
A well executed attempt at longer storytelling that fails to deliver a satisfying conclusion and falls a bit flat since it lacks that special uncanny realism that Stålenhag does so well in his stories set in Sweden. (3/5)
It's easy to draw parallels between the neurocasters and social media (or between the consequences of them and the opioid crisis[a]), but the book doesn't really do very much with such an interpretation. The neurocasters and their Stålenhagian-cyclopean built infrastructure serve mostly as a fixed background element for the story.
The Electric State marks Stålenhags transition into proper storytelling from the sequence of vignettes that was Tales From the Loop and Things From the Flood. He doesn't quite make it.
A lot of the existential dread and dystopic atmosphere of the previous two books came from the viewpoint of a young kid growing up in a world they couldn't yet understand, and we could easily see ourselves in that position. Reading their limited description of what happened, the reader could take cues from what was only hinted and alluded to and fill the unknowns with their own horrors. But in The Electric State the main characters do understand the world - they just won't tell us. A lot is being alluded to and hinted at, but this time the technique falls flat and we're just left unsatisfied by the book failing to deliver. In particular, one of the main mysteries of the story is left unresolved and up to the reader to fill in. I've scoured the web and read more comments than I can count, but it seems that nobody has managed to figure it out.
The same goes for the artwork. Part of Stålenhag's genius was his ability to distill '70s and '80s Sweden and craft an uncanny alternate universe. The war drones are littering the landscape like giant mechanical mesas, and he does capture the feeling of driving through the desert - but there is an absence of the little details that he filled his Swedish settings with. Stålenhag grew up in Sweden, but he went on a road trip in the US - and as a result his Swedish settings are unmistakably Swedish, but The Electric State could take place anywhere.
That said, had this been yet another story set in '80s Sweden, I would have complained about that, too.