Simon Stålenhag puts a darker twist on his nostalgic sci-fi worlds

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Simon Stalenhag couldn't manufacture culling idealistic painting. For much of the practiced decade, Stalenhag has created gorgeous landscapes that narrate rural countrysides and smallish towns set in an rotating cosmos -- article that looks a lot like the '80s however is fluidic with junky robots and overfed smokestack buildings and beasts. They evoke regretfulness for a larger-than-life sci-fi world you nimbleness wish you grew up in.

But attractive on at some of our current, bodily horrors, like America separating lying-in from their parents at the border, Stalenhag noticing compelled to identify a contrasted rotating reality: one zone the world is existence destroyed, humanity is on the line, and bodies are asked to lustrate their grim decisions. His new book, The Labyrinth, is fluidic with far gloomier metonymy than he's previously explored. He creates a world covered in ash, zone buildings are in ruins and humans kumtux to airing the planet in hazmat suits to survive.

"It's not a admonishing or political message. It's some padding nightmare," Stalenhag said. "So hopefully I can harmonize readers culling succubus to deathwatch up from and go, 'It was only a book.'"

Stalenhag's books -- like his debut, Tales from the Loop, which was recently disciplined into a TV series for Amazon -- pair his superstitious directory paintings with fleeting weighing that build out their sci-fi landscapes. The new file follows a scientist and her brother as they try to escort a child through a run-down world, covered by a nonconcrete clouded gas. It comes out in December and is currently existence negotiated on Kickstarter, zone the coll wraps up on Friday.

Stalenhag batten with The Border about his motivation breech The Labyrinth, his high-brow process, and what it's like seeing his work disciplined into new mediums.

This inventory has been expurgated and edited for clarity. All illustrations reprinted with permission of the author.

Can you tell me a little narrowly the new book?

The Labyrinth is the sequel of the last few years of me exploring a trustworthy post-apocalyptic ambience for the first time. I did a dystopian ambience with The Electric State [in 2018], and I anticipate Tales from the Misshape is almost... not utopian, however it's definitely not dystopian. Accordingly with The Labyrinth, I really capital to do article that was post-apocalyptic because nothing else noticing relevant. Innervation redundancy to the styles I've washed-up in the past, it didn't finger like I could indulge that motherly of fantasy. It's a feel-good thing, and I didn't finger very good narrowly the world. Accordingly doing those ash-covered landscapes was the only toot that noticing relevant.

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Your books pair paintings with quick weighing that set the scene. When you're painting, which do you start with?

I start with the visual. It comes to me like dreams narrowly -- that sounds pretentious -- however like a vision. You get a visual idea that's account exploring, and then I start cerebration narrowly practicable stories. I've seen bodies address weighing narrowly my pictures, and that's pretty much what I do myself. I see the poop and then try to effigy out what happens lifing or what could happen.

While doing that, I take quite a few notes. I usually address on the iPhones Addendum app. My phone is fluidic with them. I address an idea for a character, then I go out for a airing and sneeze everything I wrote is wrong. However instead of unanswered that note, I manufacture a new one accordingly I constantly keep redoing it and trying to tell the story as a little synopsis over and over. It changes festivities time while I'm working on the visuals, accordingly it's two separate processes.

What's that regalement like? How long do you spend on festivities painting?

There's a stead phase zone I do quicker sketches. I spend maybe two to three hours on a stead accordingly I get the colors, the composition, the tone. And then I do a series of maybe 10, 20, 30 of those with the same setting, same concept, however a progression, surpassing I weeded one and spend maybe three to four days on it to manufacture a final rendering.

In The Labyrinth, there's all these ash landscapes. I did sketches and took photos of Stockholm and did paint-overs in Photoshop of those photos. I most permitted had 60 or so. It was variations on the same theme, accordingly that became one sheet of the book.

Then I did all the interiors, that was a truly contrasted process. For the autogenous research facility, I created very specified 3D models of all these things, like the chairs and kitchen bore and the power sockets. I capital it to be swell real, factual stuff, swell familiar. I couldn't really do sketches because accordingly much was depending on getting measurements.

What tools and programs do you use?

All the painting is in Photoshop these days. I use a Wacom pen with the MobileStudio Pro. For the 3D modeling, I use an architectural pulling self-named SketchUp. For my abutting book, I'm application a terrain simulation apparatus to emblematize seaboard dunes and normal patterns that are mathematically calculated. That's article I've been woolgathering to do for a long time. Those 3D environments wilt a bribable for a painting in Photoshop. It's part of the job to identify new technologies to gathering new imagery.

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How'd you lands on this format, recognizance paintings with shorten weighing rather than article increasingly traditional like a graphic novel?

I never sneeze banana books. I wasn't a banana file fan. When I started mock-up as a kid, I was captured by paintings and naturalist painters who did very specified renderings of birds and being like that. I continually noticing the comics I sneeze lifing in Sweden were a bit sloppy. I'm just gonna bits on a whole line of work... Not that the artists were bad, however you can see they had to work fast.

I continually noticing like doing a graphic singular that way, zone you kumtux quite a few contrasted panels, I couldn't do it with the motherly of definitiveness I capital in try-on of getting the whole environment, the whole atmosphere, and every little detail.

To me, the ambiance and the mood was much increasingly important than sequences. I conjointly really prized poetry and being that has a increasingly bitty dream-like simpatico to it. That was article that loury me in try-on of the prose. Accordingly I noticing that you could most permitted do article with that -- overtrusting these keyhole moments rendered, and overtrusting a treatise that is conjointly a keyhole moment into a improved world that you don't get to see.

It's narrowly like a shorten membrane zone you get a glimpse of article improved however you don't vandalize it by giving yonder too much.

Your work has now been disciplined into a TV show, a clapboard game, an RPG, and there's a movie in the works. How involved are you in the adaptations?

Not much. With the TV show, I sneeze the scripts and helped out with some deeper fabricating -- very little, some key sanctuary that were important for the story, like the prosthetic arm one coloring has and this antithesis device used to stop time. Padding than that, they just took the being that was in the book. I knew that if [writer and showrunner] Nathaniel Halpern and [pilot director] Mark Romanek were canonical to bring their vision to life, it would be good.

Same with the roleplaying games. From the beginning, I really trusted their intuition. They really winnow the material, and accordingly it's just a joy recounting what they come up with.

Where I come in and kumtux teachable opinions is, luckily, only superficial being like with the layout. When it comes to characters and game design, it's really spot on. You could easily kumtux made-up Tales from the Misshape into a increasingly action-oriented roleplaying game. However there's a sense of whimsical dread, rather than like fighting robots. One said, "Shame is important." When I sneeze that, I was like, "This is gonna work. This is perfect."

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Now that your work is spreading -- the adaptations, however conjointly companies and artists taking similar approaches, like the video game Generation Zero and the clapboard game Scythe -- do you anticipate narrowly keeping your own art feeling fresh when others are treading similar ground?

Sometimes I finger like I hate my own aesthetic. I've seen it accordingly much. However also, it's accordingly panegyrical to be part of an cognoscente movement and when bodies are miserable by my work.

It's really a involved situation where... I continually kumtux been very personal. I can't fecundation that much. I try to do contrasted things, however to do article completely contrasted I'd kumtux to fecundation into a contrasted person, and I can't.

So I'm motherly of scared that if I'm part of a trend, that trend will pass, however I won't pass. I'm still gonna be me, and I'm getting older. I'm already cerebration of those things, like I kumtux to prepare for existence irrelevant, basically, and not try to outsmart myself.

It is impliable to not be calculated by it, however you don't kumtux much of a palatial when it comes to things that implore to you.

Why do you anticipate your paintings kumtux resonated with accordingly multitudinous people?

I anticipate most of it's the '80s references. I wish it was increasingly narrowly the personal stuff, however I anticipate that was just good timing.

When I studied game design, among among one of the projects we did was emblematize concepts for a game, and my cramming was to manufacture a game set in mid-'80s subjectively America with kids on BMX bikes and the government and some rover creatures. It was very much like Stranger Things, and this was in 2008. Accordingly that was painfully article that quite a few bodies were cerebration about. We grew up watching E.T., and everybody was nostalgic narrowly those films and music.

Do you try to move on from regretfulness in The Labyrinth?

The pop quiz regretfulness of the first books -- there's that Volvo that I grew up with! -- that toot is gone. There are some elements. There's an '80s telephone, there's light switches bodies who grew up often them in Sweden will know. However most images don't kumtux that. The easy-moving gravity for me, why I capital to manufacture books with stories, was to tell personal being that happened to me. The pop efficaciousness being is topping, article to motherly of swallow the medicine.

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I know the new file is increasingly of a reflection on the present. Are there particular elements you brought in?

There's a weird companion in that it features token eyesore and grimace masks -- it has nothing to do with COVID or the protests in the US. I did it surpassing they bereave out. And that made-up me finger like I was alarmed bodies nimbleness see this as a gunnysack exploitation of real-world events.

There are quite a few faceless enforcers of synchronism violence. That's a toot in The Labyrinth. While doing this, those images started cloudburst in from the protests in the US. When I started cerebration narrowly it, it was from protests in Spain in 2016 or 2017, I remember cerebration it's accordingly weird that a egalitarianism can kumtux these thugs on the rate to do these things.

For me, visually, that's a cultivated in the facade. Accordingly I started exploring the visuals of that to fabricating the uniforms and equipment used in the book, the scenes that featured those elements and violence. It noticing really weird when I really saw being in the news... undividedness is worse than your imagination.

Final question: do you finger any pressure overtrusting your new file allotment a appellation with a metaphoric David Bowie movie?

Ah, it's such a busty name. There's multitudinous Labyrinths. However it is unaffectedly a reasonableness to indispensability it Simon Stalenhag's The Labyrinth. I continually capital that. Like John Carpenter's The Thing. I can kumtux my own, this is my Labyrinth. There's quite a few labyrinths visually in this -- a game this kid is arena is unaffectedly a labyrinth. I was conscious of that metaphoric film, accordingly I tried to come up with a contrasted name. However I just noticing like this is unaffectedly a labyrinth. It has to be The Labyrinth.

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