The Surrogates
Top Shelf Publications
Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele
I read The Homeland Directive by Robert Venditti sometime last year and I’ve got to admit I wasn’t the biggest fan of the work. It just didn’t capture my attention as much as I thought it would, but I kept hearing good things about The Surrogates and thought I’d give it a try. And wow. All of the good things I heard about it were right and this book now has a place on bookshelf (which doesn’t happen with every book that I read.)
The year is 2054 and android surrogates are a way of life. Only the children are real and everyone else interacts with the world via their surrogates all without ever leaving the comfort of their home. It’s a perfect world. It’s a peaceful world thanks to hard working folks of the Metro Police Department. Detective Harvey Greer is at peace and enjoying life with his wife…even though they never really “see” each other in person. And then things change. A techno-terrorist is bent on forcing society back to a time when people lived their lives for themselves instead of experiencing them through a surrogate’s touch. And Detective Greer is thrust into the middle of a battle both in the real world and at home. And everything will change.
As I mentioned above I wasn’t a big fan of the other work, mostly because it seemed to be a bit too familiar to me. But The Surrogates was exciting and had a great build up to the tension and conflict between the two sides of society, those that advocated the surrogates and those that wanted to go back to a mortal life. Even better was the tension that built between the characters, such as Detective Greer and his wife, who started off on the same side until Greer discovered there was a great deal to life he was missing. The story reminds me a great deal of Isaac Asimov’s books featuring Elijah Bailey and the spacer worlds, with the subtle tension between the characters, especially as they start to change. It’s a great storyline and I’m glad that I gave it a read.
The artwork…is different and somewhat difficult for me to describe. When I first looked at it I really didn’t like it, it just felt uneasy on my eyes, in part because of the blurred and muted backgrounds which were just splashes of color never really following the shape or the outline of the characters. But the more I got into the story the better the artwork worked for the tale and the more that I liked it. The style is a basic black line drawing of the characters and the building, but accented by dynamic shadow and white highlights to create a gritty, futuristic feel to the book. He also at times uses computer imagery, such as detailing schematics, which for me threw off the pacing of the story a bit. I much preferred the sketchy, muted color scheme to the hard computer line drawings.
As I said at the beginning this book has found a place on my bookshelf and I’d be willing to give other books by Robert V a try after enjoying this one (heck I may even give The Homeland Directive another read.) I’d recommend this book to fans of futuristic/sci-fi stories such as as Isaac Asimov, Blade Runner, and others.
