Name: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
Rating: 3 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780575118317

D. G. Compton

D.G. Compton's extraordinary novel is a forgotten classic of British SF that exposed the pitfalls of voyeuristic entertainment decades before the likes of 'The Truman Show'.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

Jeff VanderMeer

Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

Lindy

In the same way Ling Ma's Severance is a novel about post-recession American millennial ennui and the loss of the American Dream through the trappings of genre fiction, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a novel about the English post-war generation's ennui and loss of an utopian future through the trappings of genre fiction. It's well-written enough, although despite Jeff VanderMeer's claim of its prescience in the introduction, extremely of its time. 

It truly has very little to do with reality television or the surveillance state. In this version of 1973, medical science has advanced to the point that, aside from some very rare exceptions, the only cause of death is old age*. Katherine Mortenhoe is diagnosed with a terminal illness at the age of 44, is given weeks to live, and becomes a celebrity overnight. Roddie, a television professional assigned to produce a show starring Katherine in her last days, has undergone experimental surgery to have video cameras implanted into his eyes. This establishes a dialectic through which Katherine and Roddie struggle to suss out a true (or 'continuous') representation of the self and the other. And of course dialectic breaks down, because the woman who's supposed to have a future doesn't have one and the television eyes that are said to never lie of course do. 

*(view spoiler)[ Or at least that's the ideology of the society; as one reads along one finds out that death by suicide, traffic accidents, and vehicular manslaughter by men angry about protesters are all common enough yet unremarked upon occurrences, which goes to show that what people really want is the marketing of a death story. (hide spoiler)]

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

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