Returning to memory lane

Simon Stålenhag's artwork has been something of a viral sensation online since the mid-2010s. He broke through the noise of the internet with his nostalgia-flavored images of an alternate Sweden from the 1980s that had been home to a scientific program gone awry, the landscape dotted with fantastical machines and structures rusting away. Tales from the Loop was a gorgeous project that invites you in with those fantastic images, with Stålenhag sketching out the story through a sparse narrative alongside them.

He followed up that project with Things from the Flood, and a pair of similar, standalone graphic – novels? Art books?, Electric State and Labyrinth. He's recently released another new book, Swedish Machines: Sunset at Point Zero, to Kickstarter backers (the regular trade edition, Sunset at Zero Point will be released in December), which he's described as his most personal book to date.

The book has all the trademarks of Stålenhag's work: sparse landscapes with giant structures, weird science projects with unintended consequences, and characters who're trying to make their way through a strange and changing world. Set in 2024, it follows its narrator after he discovers a note with a date written down on it – just a couple of days in the future, and it prompts him to return home to revisit his past.

Stålenhag bounces between 2024 and the early-2000s as his protagonist, Linus, travels down memory lane. After leaving his small town in Sweden to study music in college, he was overwhelmed with anxiety and forced to drop out and return. It's there that he reconnects with a school friend, Valter, now working as a security guard for Black Fallow, the remains of a top secret facility, run by a company called Swedish Machines, which was home to a strange military experiment that ended disastrously, and is now closed off to the public.

In the mid-1970s, something went wrong. "The moment the weapon was activated, it triggered an explosion so powerful it was recorded by US seismographs in the northern Cascades...when the sun set that day (described by eyewitnesses as one of the eeriest sunsets they had ever seen), an area of thirty-seven square miles had been destroyed and over the next three weeks all of the island's 1,200 resident families would be forced to leave their homes."

Over the course of the Cold War, we've seen all types of man-made disasters take place around the world, such as the meltdowns at the nuclear plants in Chernobyl and  Fukushima, or explosions and leaks from chemical plants or crashes like in Bhopal, India or East Palestine, Ohio. These are moments that are ripe for speculative storytelling: books like Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's classic novel Roadside Picnic or Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, in which we encounter strange zones where time and space intersect in unpredictable ways.

But where the zones and their origins or relationship to the characters figure prominently into the story, Stålenhag sticks it in the foreground: opting to put the story of Linus and Valter front and center as they work to figure out their feelings for one another as they advance into adulthood, and how they fit into the world.

As with the real world, it's complicated and messy. Our two characters connect over their shared fascination with finding out the secretive nature of what happened in the zone back in the 1970s. Linus struggles with his anxieties and mental health while Valter contends with his own trauma: his father's suicide. They find comfort in one another when they begin to hook up, but they never quite become a couple, even if there's an attraction between them. As Linus slowly finds his footing, while Valter sinks deeper and deeper into obsession, something that begins to drive them apart. They move on, and years later, they reconnect when Linus discovers the mysterious scribbled date.

Stålenhag’s sprinkles in some details about physics and alternate universes when it comes to the Black Fallow, and in a lot of ways, this feels like a story about the opportunities that we miss as we move through life, and the lengths that we'll go to obsess over those moments. It's a mature and thoughtful lesson, one that takes hindsight and a considerable amount of self-awareness to comprehend, and as I get older, I recognize just how many of those moments I might have missed, and how agonizing over the roads not taken can be a futile exercise. One might miss a path, but while the forks seem enormous or formidable in the moment, the passage of time shows that they're often a blip or aberration.

Swedish Machines is a sublime read: Stålenhag’s artwork and storytelling is at their best, with a focused, emotional, and thoughtful take on the human condition.