Graphic Novel Book Club: The Surrogates, Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele

Our penultimate title for the year-long graphic novel book club experiment actually got turned into a movie with Bruce Willis!  (The movie wasn't very good, unfortunately.)

The Surrogates
Robert Venditti
art by Brett Weldele
ISBN: 9781891830877
Read July 10, 2016

Think Blade Runner, but everyone (well, pretty much everyone) WANTS to be artificial.  Shades of Ready Player One in there also.  Robotics and cosmetics industries have advanced to the point that "surrogates:" (remotely-controlled real-life robotic avatars of a particular person) are more commonly seen than actual flesh-and-blood people, who are all at home, connected to their computers to run the surrogate's actions in real-time.  Surrogates are faster, stronger, prettier, and allow people to be free from worries of actual physical damage to their real human bodies (except for getting fat as shit, getting deep-vein thrombosis, or getting bedsores from sitting in one place all day, none of which is referenced at all.)  Things are great until some mysterious freak starts frying surrogates, and suspicion falls on a modern-day prophet figure who is rabidly anti-surrogate, and has amassed a religious army in a recently-allocated reservation under his own local rule, where surrogates are not allowed.

Interesting questions of social consciousness, of abdicating personal responsibility, and of the line between helping people who need assistance (surrogates were initially medical devices intended for medically "locked-in" people) and making shitloads of money on luxuries that quickly become common or standard.

I would have liked to see a lot more depth in the world building - I think there were some ideas and concepts that weren't very well meshed up with human psychology and the reality of life in the world, but it was also an interesting, if slightly dark and depressing, mystery thriller.

Australian Science Fiction: Spare Parts, Sally Rogers-Davidson

I saw this book described online and I was intensely curious about it.  I'm glad I read it, but I don't know that I would describe it as a good book.  Still, an interesting near-future premise, and a very excellent job of worldbuilding a split society grappling with transgenetics and cyber-life.  

Spare Parts

Sally Rogers-Davidson

ISBN: 9781471095382

Shortlisted for the 1999 Aurealis Award, and a Notable Australian Children's Book for 2000.

Kelty lives in Melbourne, lower Melbourne to be exact.  She's a subby, and lives on the street level of the city, as far from the rich in their beautiful towers as night is from day.  She's been toying with the idea of getting away from her limited prospects by joining the Space Exploration Program; a move that will require her to transplant her mind into a cyborg body capable of withstanding the rigors of space.  Her decision is made more urgent when her best friend is gravely injured in a boiler accident, and Kelty's young, beautiful, virginal body is the only thing she owns of enough value to help pay for her friend's necessary medical treatments.  

This was a delightful premise, and the worldbuilding and sociology was deft and interesting.  The class divisions between the subbies and the Skywalkers were realistic and individual, while the concerns and moral questions raised about the morals of body-shopping and becoming a cyborg were interspersed with more philosophical questions about citizenship and choice and social currencies.

The story itself was not as interesting as it could have been.  Despite being quite frank about sexuality and body image/nakedness (this book would never ever ever fly as a children's book in the prudish  USA), the actual plot is rather disappointingly simplistic and naive.  Kelty sees a problem, sets out to overcome it, and does so.  There aren't really any huge roadblocks or massive difficulties in her way; by contrast, she's constantly helped by the people she meets, and even the "twist" of the story is a benign one.  I would have appreciated a bit more peril, to be quite honest.  

Still, it was interesting and thought-provoking, and I'm glad to have read it.