Simon Stålenhag used to post some digital paintings he had done of an imagined retrofuturistic Sweden. They depicted everyday life in an alternate '80s and '90s, with huge, towering structures in the background, hovering freight ships in the night sky, and rusty robot hulks dotting the landscape of the islands in Lake Mälaren where he grew up. A few noticed.
Ur varselklotet: illustrerade sägner ur Slingans landskap 1984-1994
Simon Stålenhag
ISBN: 9789188805966
Fria Ligan, 2020-03-13
Swedish and English
- Editions
- Ur Varselklotet
First Swedish edition
ISBN: 9789187222115
Fria Ligan, 2014-09-25 - Tales From the Loop
English edition
ISBN: 9781982150693
Skybound Books, 2020-04-07
- Ur Varselklotet
Stålenhag improved his vignette-by-vignette storytelling in the sequel Things From the Flood, which I think is the better book due to it being a more cohesive work. Still, Tales From the Loop will still stand alongside Aniara as a landmark in Swedish science fiction, and probably be the landmark of the 2010s. (5/5)
Then everyone noticed when in August 2013 first Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing[a] and then The Verge published them[b], and "Swedish retrofuturism" exploded over the Internet. In particular they took off like wildfire in the Swedish part. The combination of wistful nostalgia, intense relatability (at least for those of us who grew up in the '70s or '80s), and an uncanny ability to make his alternate universe so thoroughly Swedish rocketed Stålenhag and his paintings to well-deserved fame.
The paintings were collected into a book, along with texts written by Stålenhag, and that book is Tales From the Loop.
The subtitle of the Swedish edition is Illustrated Tales From the Loop Country, and this is the first time we meet Stålenhag's fictional "Loop" universe - an alternate Sweden where there's an underground particle accelerator (the eponymous Loop) under the islands just west of Stockholm, with a space-time bending "gravitron" at its heart, and whose reality-warping effects stretch out of the ground and into the lives of people living on the islands. The tales are told from the perspective of the kids there, who live in that everyman state of ignorance of how the Loop works, combined with the automatic acceptance that "this is just how the world is" that children have. Incomprehensible spacetime anomaly teleported your dinner meatballs into outer space? Just ask mom for more, she usually makes some extra just in case.
It's wonderful. It's uncanny. It's the kind of existential horror you'd see in a Cthulhu novel.
Due to the book originating as a series of paintings that shared a universe but weren't part of a story, it's a series of only somewhat connected vignettes, with some being nothing more than mundane descriptions of everyday life. But that is the story. This is what you'd expect from the Local Heritage Association - if you lived in Stålenhag's parallel universe.
Stålenhag improved his vignette-by-vignette storytelling in the sequel Things From the Flood, which I think is the better book due to it being a more cohesive work. Still, Tales From the Loop will still stand alongside Aniara as a landmark in Swedish science fiction, and probably be the landmark of the 2010s.