The Labyrinth

Two walking machines stand in a field of dead grass, one close enough to read the panel lines and warning lights on its hull, the other dissolving into the haze behind it. Ahead of them, people. The two figures in high visibility vests are armed, moving fast and low through the scrub, and the direction they are heading tells you what they are: not surveyors, but police, closing on the adult and child standing further along the ridge. Whatever authority they answer to seems to be the same one these machines serve. The whole scene is washed in a sickly yellow green, the colour of air you would not want to breathe, and that mist is the point. The image comes from Simon Stålenhag's 2020 book The Labyrinth, set after a disaster wrapped the Earth in a permanent toxic cloud, with survivors crowded into underground colonies and sending crews up into the ruins above.

Stålenhag is a Swedish artist, born in 1984, who worked as a nature and wildlife illustrator before turning to science fiction. That training shows. The birch scrub, the young spruce, the muddy ditch cutting through the foreground are all drawn from the countryside he grew up in, and the machines are dropped into it as casually as farm equipment. His books, including Tales from the Loop and The Electric State, have been adapted for television and film, mostly because the pictures came first and the stories grew out of them.

The detail that changes the mood is the child in the orange coat, standing beside an adult, looking toward the machine without any visible alarm. The threat in this picture is not the giant walker. It is the two small figures running through the grass with guns, and the fact that nobody in the scene seems surprised by any of it.