Sunday, February 18, 2007

The Surrogates - Is Technology Always an Improvement?


This was a really great graphic novel and I have to thank Lee for turning me onto this book http://comicsand.blogspot.com/2007/01/weekly-buzz.html .

Lee does a nice job of reviewing the story, so I won't reiterate, but what I liked in addition to the actual story is the themes it touched on. As a culture that is obsessed in some ways with always trying to be younger and refusing to acknowledge that our appearance can change and we can still always be mentally young, this books serves as the ultimate extreme. Also the ideas of gender and race equality as never being resolved was really interesting as humans we will always stereotype as it just the way our minds work, so getting surrogates would be the one way of finally removing all barriers.

Finally I think a theme that I think about a lot was in the book and that is one of technology removing us away from the real world. While technology provides us a way of keeping in touch and shopping online it also has removed some of the social interaction that we used to have. Ultimately whether this is a positive or negative social force only time will tell.

Anyway thanks Lee for a great read and this graphic novel is on its way to Brainiac6 who will then loan it to Airelle.

7 comments:

  1. Glad you liked it.. the ideas were presented well and I still think the ending is really good. Should've but didn't see it coming.

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  2. Cool! I thought it sounded like a neat idea when Lee wrote about it, glad to hear it'll be trickling down to me eventually (finally found the time to start Lost: season 2 today, Brainiac6 is right, it eats your brain).

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  3. Yay! Brain death by Lost!

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  4. It is true about Lost, I was very tired for the week or so I was watching it, as I could never watch just one episode and I would watch about 4 at a time and be very tired at work the next day.

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  5. I've watched the first four, unfortunately, it will probably be Friday night before I get the chance to watch more!

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  6. Jim,

    Glad to see you like the book. Rob, the guy who wrote the book, is a good friend of mine. It has been great to see how good his first comic is doing. I have great hopes for his future.

    Richard

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  7. Richard - The book was very cool. Let me know what else he does as I liked the way this book read a lot.

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