Tales from the Loop

Tales from the Loop by Simon Stålenhag, 125 pages

I'm not sure whether to describe this as beautiful paintings accompanied by very short stories, or very short stories illustrated by beautiful paintings, but either way this wonderfully imaginative book tells the story of the people who lived and worked around the entirely fictitious Loop, a particle accelerator in a remote part of Sweden from the 1970s through 1990s. The paintings bring to life the odd robots, cooling towers, magnet-powered hover-vehicles, and various high-tech detritus that our unnamed narrator (perhaps Stålenhag, in his imagination?) saw everyday while he was growing up. This is a fascinating bit of speculative fiction, and Stålenhag's artwork is astounding.