The Electric State
Simon Stalenhag, 2017
Premise: Michelle is traveling to the coast to find something important. No one can help her. Many people are dead or nearly so, hooked into a VR technology that gave people something so much better than reality that they were lost to it. Accompanied only by a robot, she reflects on her life and tries to avoid ominous forces.
After not finishing the recent Netflix adaptation because it's boring, I found many people online bemoaning how bad the movie was compared to how good the book is. So I asked the library to send it my way when there was a spare copy. A few months later, here we are.
It's a really cool book, y'all.
It's largely an art book, made up of these huge, eerie paintings, depicting a tech-heavy world crumbling under its own inventions. Lonely vistas overseen by abandoned towers or half-buried robots, watched by ubiquitous advertising, but no people.
The images are accompanied by text describing sections of Michelle's journey and flashbacks to her short life so far, interspersed with ominous instructions given by some other being to someone who seems to be chasing her.
I won't give away the ending, but I had to read it several times. It's big and weird and beautiful and sad and creepy and it's all visual and ambiguous and... whew.
It's an experience. It's gorgeous. That movie taking a tiny piece of it and turning it into generic TV-movie dreck is a travesty.
Check it out if you get a chance. Just maybe not right before bed.
4 Stars - A Very Good Book
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