In September, an adaptation of Robert Venditti’s Top Shelf graphic novel The Surrogates will hit the big screens starring Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames. The book is a sci-fi thriller about future technologies. Venditti explains it thusly, “The basic idea is a that a Surrogate is a representation of yourself that you send out into the world. You do it virtually, so you experience everything it does. You’re controlling all of its movements and getting all of its sensory data in real time.”
The idea was born out of an examination of the social implications of sites social networking and online gaming. “That started out with me looking at online culture,” explains Venditti. “People have crazy personas of themselves through gaming and chatting. At some point you have to surrender that persona to go to work or whatever. My idea was to take it out of the machine and put it into the world.”
The technologies in The Surrogates are entirely a figment of Venditti’s imagination, of course, but since writing the book seven years ago, something odd has started happening–the science fiction of The Surrogates is beginning to become a reality. “It was something I made up,” Venditti tells me, “but since writing that in 2002, I’ve heard news stories like one about a professor who lives in Japan, but he doesn’t want to have to commute to work because the traffic is really bad, so he actually has an android version of himself in the classroom, so he teaches class by remotely linking from home.”
Smells like a sequel to me.
