I was alone in some hotel room somewhere a few years back, exhausted after teaching a workshop, when I impulsively bought this book during its kickstarter campaign. I figured I didn’t have any proper coffee table books and this one and its companion piece, Things from the Flood, had made their home on our coffee table for some years. I would flip through and look at the pictures in the book but never got around to reading it from cover to cover until now.
I first discovered Stålenhag on Instagram from following accounts that post fantasy and sci-fi art. His paintings always stood out to me because it was this potent mix of world building and nostalgia. All his paintings are a reimagining of his childhood in suburban Sweden, but a suburbia that has been transformed by the presence of huge robotic walkers, enigmatic scientific facilities looming in the background, or floating ships drifting across the sky. And transformed maybe isn’t the right word here because all of this sci-fi scenery seems to just be nonchalantly co-existing with very normal and mundane images of a suburban childhood – exploring the countryside with friends, lone family sedan in a parking lot, or the cozy glow of a light from a window of a house nestled in snow (lots of snow since it is set in Sweden).
All of which just floods you with a deep sense of nostalgia.
When I was a kid I would spend lots of time outside wandering around imagining all the environments around me were these fantastical worlds. I was always adrift in some daydream when I was outside. So, I don’t know if that’s something common that lots of people do but Stålenhag’s paintings instantly resonated with me because he seemed to have spent his childhood doing the exact same thing I did, and on top of that he made it into his art in his adulthood.
Each painting in the book is a whole world unto itself – just looking at the pictures sets your imagination off on a journey, like a Rorschach test for world building. But the book also has text accompanying the paintings that ties them all together into at least the background to a story. The setting is a town in Sweden where a giant particle accelerator called the Loop was built in the 1950s, which caused a lot of weird shifts in our reality and spurred the invention of really advanced technologies like robots and levitating vehicles. The story is set in the 80s and 90s when most of these facilities had been abandoned and so it creates this landscape of rusting machinery that our protagonist and his friends spent their childhoods exploring.
Nothing remarkable really happens according to text that accompanies the pictures. Or rather, everything that does happen, even though they are quite out of this world, is described in the text in a very muted, deadpan way. There’s a story of twins who exchanged bodies when they ventured into a big orb like thing abandoned by the highway; a friend who teleported to Nevada and recalled some wild adventures which was recounted by the author with a “hmm sure that’s cool I guess” demeanor; or a graveyard of androids where even though they have been reduced to dismembered rusting body parts, still have eyes that follow you when you pass them.
The last paragraphs of text really brought home the essence of nostalgia. As the protagonist and his friends reached their teenage years, the facility was also decommissioned. Wandering outside fell out of favor, “playtime was replaced, piece by piece, by computers”.
You lose the expansive view of the world that you had as a child… “we returned to our old playgrounds like zombies around a mall… smoking stolen cigarettes.”