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Simon Stålenhag

Tales from the Loop Hardcover – Download: Adobe Reader, December 1, 2015

by Simon Stålenhag (Author), Simon Stalenhag (Artist)

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Now in development to be an Amazon Studios series! Simon Stålenhag’s Tales from the Loop is a wildly successful crowd-funded project that takes viewers on a surprising sci-fi journey through various country and city landscapes―from small towns in Sweden and the deserts of Nevada to the bitter chill of Siberia―where children explore and engage with abandoned robots, vehicles, and machinery large and small, while dinosaurs and other creatures wander our roads and fields. Stålenhag’s paintings and stories take place in an alternate version of Sweden in the ’80s and ’90s, primarily in the countryside of Mälaröarna, a string of islands just west of Stockholm, and how this reality came about: the development of the Loop, a large particle accelerator and the side effects of the massive project. These incredibly captivating works and accompanying text capture perhaps a not-too-distant reality that is both haunting and imminent: addressing the many ways developing technology and nature can create havoc and wonder in our world―plus, its impact on the next generation. This is the English edition of the first book in Swedish that sold out in its initial printing.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Design Studio Press
Publication date

December 1, 2015
Dimensions

10.5 x 0.5 x 11.5 inches
ISBN-10

1624650392
ISBN-13

978-1624650390
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Simon Stålenhag
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Hardcover
42 offers from $15.99
Simon Stålenhag
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Hardcover
56 offers from $15.99
Simon Stålenhag
112
Hardcover
43 offers from $19.36
Syd Mead
812
Hardcover
45 offers from $20.14
John Harris
449
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51 offers from $20.81
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Tales from the Loop is Sci-Fi Art Excellence: "Stålenhag was far and away my favorite sci-fi artist of 2015, and Tales From the Loop will show you why. His universe is a dystopia you wouldn’t mind exploring, one that oppresses you with mystery and beauty rather than drab soldiers or vacuous “you have this emotion, therefore you belong in this group” regimes. The Loop is sophisticated sci-fi buried under snowy Swedish dirt. And I can’t wait to dig deeper.” ―Kyle Hill, Nerdist

Tales From The Loop Is A Stunning Book Of Alternate Nostalgia: “We’re enormous fans of Simon Stålenhag’s artwork around here, ever since we first came across him in 2013. His work mixes high-tech futurism with scenes from every day Sweden. Now, he’s released a brilliant art book…” ―Andrew Liptak, io9.com

"Simon Stålenhag did not forget the robots. More to the point, Simon Stålenhag can’t forget the robots, because in his remarkable, beautiful new art book, Tales From The Loop, he has embedded them into our collective past, offering a vision of an alt-history Sweden in the late 80’s and early 90’s where they clack through suburban streets, lurk in the backyard trees, or lie, still and cold, abandoned in snowy fields.” ―Jason Sheenan, npr.org

"If you've got a geek in your family who needs a Christmas present, this should be it. They'll love you forever. If you've got a young nerd in need of corruption ― a kid who'd benefit from having their reality shaken and their head filled with impossible things ― this'll do the trick because, Tales has the magic. It's got the robots, the weirdness, the dinosaurs." - NPR.ORG

About the Author

Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag burst onto the art scene in 2013 when his first series of paintings were shared on the Internet, and has since become something of a phenomena in the art and sci-fi communities. His original blend of naturalistic landscape paintings with science-fiction elements and a very low-key recollection of growing up in the ’80s struck a chord, not just in Sweden, but all over the world. The Verge, Wired, IO9, Scientific American, and The Guardian have all praised his work. But until late 2014, the only place you could watch his art was in digital form on the Internet. Stålenhag splits his time between a small cabin at Mälaröarna (the setting that inspires his work) and an apartment in Stockholm.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Design Studio Press (December 1, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1624650392
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1624650390
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.4 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 10.5 x 0.5 x 11.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #153,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #58 in Conceptual Arts (Books)
- #796 in Individual Artists (Books)
- #3,168 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
1,265 ratings

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Arthur McBain

The artwork is great, but the "Amazon originals" circle is not a sticker and cannot be removed

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2020

Verified Purchase

The hardcover is great quality and the contents are great, as expected. However I disagree with the publisher's choice of making the Amazon circle part of the cover artwork instead of a removable sticker. I like that it got turned into a series, but I don't need to be advertised at every time I pull out this book.

33 people found this helpful

Helpful

Alex Vaccaro

The "Now an Official Amazon Prime TV Show" Sticker Ruins The Aesthetic For Me

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

Don't get me wrong, the contents of this book are great.

However, IMHO it's inexcusable for an Art Book to have a permanently embedded sticker hawking its Amazon Prime TV adaptation.

I get that we're in late stage capitalism, everything is commodity, advertising, Simon has to make money, but for me, this sticker ruins the aesthetic of the book.

22 people found this helpful

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Miguel Grande

Tales of the Loop Kindle book a bit disappointing

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

I had just finished Tales of the Loop on Prime Video, and loved it. I highly recommend this series! So, I thought getting the book (Kindle version) that the series was based on would be interesting. Now, the book isn't bad; it's kind of interesting to see how the author created this strange world of futuristic technology, intermixed with the old. But, it wasn't for the almost $20 price. The images were fewer than I'd imagined and most small, and that's with the largest model iPad. You must open up and expand each one. Sounds like a trivial complaint, but it makes a difference. I would rather have had full-sized images to just scroll through. It would seem an easy fix to make. The text accompanying the artwork is an interesting spin on the series. In all, I'm reluctant to recommend this, given the steep price and problem cited. But, for those who like the series as much as I did, it might be worth it.

24 people found this helpful

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T. Cooper

Illustrated tales of a weird childhood that never was.

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2017

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Stålenhag's work intentionally works on the level of nostalgia; as '80s kids start reaching their middle age, they reminisce about the vibrancy of their early years where everything was bright and full of adventure but the planet still seemed to be falling apart thanks to end of industrialization in the West. The truly clever conceit here is that the super-science of the Loop creates an entirely false nostalgia for robots and space-bending portals that never were, which highlights that all our nostalgias are for a past as we've chosen to remember it, not the past that actually was. If we look back honestly, as the fictional narrator does, we can now recognize that tragedies large and small surrounded us that we were isolated from--/this/ neighbor disappeared, everyone stopped talking about /that/ family--and so barely registered on our conscious minds. Even today in the real world we shy away from explicit recognition of these realizations, preferring to concentrate on the toys and the games that seemed to promise so much.

Or the robots.

Their loss--and, perhaps more tellingly, the loss of what they promised as we grew into the world we know now--is still felt.

51 people found this helpful

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J.J. Scott

An intriguing, yet meandering, work that shows more potential than is realized

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2020

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We're a story-driven society, and are inherently drawn to connect things together. This work is quite intriguing - the glimpse of an alternate history, coupled with the target audience's sense of nostalgia. Though, to be fair, this work is most suitable for anyone over the age of 30. Teenagers may glean something from it, but considering the protagonist is looking back upon his own journey (from childhood to the cusp of adulthood) some of the material won't resonate as well.
The initial story captures the imagination, but unfortunately it seems as if the author got bored with it, and decided to bring in Dinosaurs. Which, by themselves is rather odd, at the same time it undermines the credibility - the suspension of belief - that I held up until that point. Sure, there are hints at tragedies - which is all well in storytelling - but he overuses this simple device. A good story can have a few of these, but when page after page after page repeats the same cliche'd formula, it gets tiring... actually, it gets boring and annoying.
There is a story here, and even a spattering of pages about divorce, but no character build-up. It seems as if playing Sonic the Hedgehog was as important as his father looking for his lost wedding ring - a ring he threw into the field.... which lead us to a divorce (of course) shortly thereafter.

If he had ditched the dinos, or introduced them carefully, rather than 'Hey, let's draw some dinos!' I would have gone along for the ride... though maybe not. Such an introduction would require a lot more than a simple, "and did I mention the portal to dino-land?"

My rating should be 3.5 stars, but Amazon's limitations prevent that.

This is an interesting work. It shows promise, but it can't hide its infancy.

17 people found this helpful

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blauereiter

An immersively illustrated sci-fi world that will suck you in.

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2016

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The media could not be loaded.

To see more pictures from the book, please visit my blog via my Amazon profile link.

Initially conceived as a 2 volume kickstarter art book project, Simon Stålenhag’s Tales from the Loop is a mesmerizing sci-fi journey that takes the viewer through various desolate country and city landscapes inhabited by abandoned robots, machinery and giant mecha.

Stålenhag combines his stunning eye for pleasing aesthetics and apt application of visual tricks like atmospherics, perspective, depth of field and subtle rim lighting to create highly cinematic images that really draw viewer in. And I love his taste for mecha and machinery.

The 2 volume kickstarter set was a little out of my price range, so I’m really glad this general release is now available and I wasted little time picking it up, lest it goes out of print again. Highly recommended.

117 people found this helpful

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Mark Brown

A one-man-genre-defined

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2020

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The books of Simon Stalenhag are their own mini-genre. You will never have experienced something quite like this unless you have already seen his other books. There are only three of them. Until this reprint was published in April 2020, copies of the original were trading at five times the cover price. Maybe we have to be grateful to Amazon for making a TV show out of this concept. I reckon those who own the first edition [without the Amazon logo on the cover] will forever treasure their investment. There is a hint at the back of the book that ‘Tales from the Loop’ (TFTL) was a product of a Kickstarter campaign. Not a bad cult following in under four years is it? From crowd-funded book to TV show in the blink of an eye.

So, what do you get in TFTL? Unlike ‘The Electric State’ (which came out only a year later) TFTL is a collection of childhood anecdotes with Simon the star of his own science-fiction-tinged universe. You wonder if the ideas in the TFTL text were dreamt up before, during or after the art was composed? It matters not. ‘The Electric State’ is different in that it follows one single story from beginning to end and the art looks mainly like it was designed around the plot. Yet it is truly hard to tell as there is only a slightly hazy relationship between art and narrative. So loose is the connection that pages of unexplained visual images fly by that add to the mood-music of the book. So, is it a science fiction story or an art book? Yes, no, maybe. Who cares? You just don’t experience Simon’s work in the same way you experience normal sci fi. His work is designed to evoke emotion. It conjures up a pre-pubescent childhood in the freezing depths of Sweden in the 1980s. You just need to immerse yourself in the book and let it flow over you. The text is your guide and holds the disparate pieces together into a whole. It isn’t quite dystopian yet a chill of fictional super-science haunts every page. These kids have adventures that are equally mundane and out-of-this-world. You may yearn to be in their place yet recoil in horror in equal measure. It isn’t quite dystopian yet a chill of fictional super-science haunts every page. The mysterious buried ‘Loop’, and its complex of research establishments, have littered the landscape with engineering waste product that serves as a vast playground for the local youth. The Loop haunts every aspect of local life. The local population’s interaction with this mysterious & sparse man-made landscape forms the concept behind the childhood memories. Everything is imbued with a sense of tragedy, waste and human frailty. The denouement has no sci fi element. It is just kids growing up and families falling apart. You will be moved. I was.

27 people found this helpful

Moosegoo

Pity about the ‘sticker’ on the cover which is not a sticker but an imprint in this edition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

I was really pleased to find that this book had been reprinted as the first English language print was no longer available. A great book but unfortunately this edition by Skybound books is spoilt by the orange ‘Amazon Original Series’ sticker on the front cover as it’s not a sticker but is in fact an imprint on the cover and so cannot be removed.
I suppose this may not bother some people but it does me.

12 people found this helpful

Tyler Yates

A must have for retro Sci-Fi fans

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 10, 2017

Verified Purchase

Simon Stålenhag is an amazing artist and writer, his world building is second to none and this book is a must have for any retro sci-fi fan.

That artwork of the book is amazing and has such a unique style. The stories and text are equally as amazing with such an imaginative plot.

The book itself is beautifully bound in hardback with the front image printed on a matte cover with the orange spine in a cloth material. The pages are printed on a nice and thick paper stock which make each page turn an experience in itself.

9 people found this helpful

J. Chapman

Lovely illustrations.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 21, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book sits behind the Amazon series of the same name, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It provides the context behind the series and individual episode storylines along with some really imaginative illustrations beautifully executed which do correlate directly with the imagery used in the Amazon series. I’m pleased with it and I got it for a fairly decent price which was a bonus.

One person found this helpful

Prea

Fantastic hard cover edition - Simon Stålenhag does it again :)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

Love Simon Stålenhag's art.
I decided to support the artist by buying this book, and the others in the series.
For me, his art style has flavours of high end shin-hanga Ukiyo-e.
Nothing remotely similar in production, of course, however his work triggers a lot of the same internal toggles of admiration of the technical skill and the aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of art to me.
05 September 2020

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