The Electric State

The Electric State appeared in 2018 and was written and painted by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. Its Swedish title is Passagen, and it arrived in English from Skybound Books. The text is made up of short passages, each attached to a large illustration of landscape, technology or people moving through them.

It belongs to an alternate 1990s that has been ruined by its own technology. Michelle, a teenage orphan, is crossing the United States towards the West Coast with a robot companion called Skip, looking for the brother she lost touch with, and the book opens with the two of them on foot in the Mojave Desert, hauling a kayak.

The road leads through Pacifica, a version of California in decline. Almost everybody there uses brain-computer interfaces known as Neurocasters. They began as military equipment, built to control enormous combat drones in a second civil war, and when they reached the civilian market they became both a way of escaping the memory of that war and an interface to virtual networks. Addiction to them is widespread, and law and order has broken down across the territory Michelle has to cross, while flashbacks gradually fill in her past and the reason she was separated from her brother.

Film rights to the book were acquired in 2017, and a tabletop game version was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2023.