What do you think?
Rate this book
Katherine Mortenhoe #1
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
A few years in the future, medical science has advanced to the point where it is practically unheard of for people to die of any cause except old-age. The few exceptions provide the fodder for a new kind of television show for avid audiences who lap up the experience of watching someone else's dying weeks. So when Katherine Mortenhoe is told that she has about four weeks to live she knows it's not just her life she's about to lose, but her privacy as well.
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
45 people are currently reading
2896 people want to read
About the author
D.G. Compton
47 books36 followersDavid Guy Compton has published science fiction as D.G. Compton. He has also published crime novels as Guy Compton and Gothic fiction as Frances Lynch.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews
September 6, 2019
Katherine Mortenhoe is nothing special. She's like everyone else: she was born, she's misunderstood, she's disappointed, she will die - and sooner than she'd hoped. She is a private person who lives in the public eye, a public composed of friends and not-friends and strangers who are only barely seeing her and hearing her, who project who they think she is upon her. Her motives and her actions are frequently misunderstood, much like everyone else. She is vaguely disappointed with herself, but she probably couldn't articulate exactly why, much like everyone else. Katherine Mortenhoe is nothing special, except for one thing: she will have her last days recorded and broadcast, so that all the world can ooh and aah at the sentimental tragedy of it all.
When is Science Fiction not Science Fiction? When it's New Wave Science Fiction of course! The science fictional trappings of this novel are simply that: trappings. Although this novel is quite definitively set in a future world, it may as well have been set in 1973, when it was first written, or in the right now of 2019. Everything in this book was relevant then as it is relevant now. From the personal made public and lack of privacy in general to medical duplicity to cookie cutter novels designed to fit their audience's needs to the greedy interest that reality tv programming has in viewing and judging personal lives while simultaneously trying to transform and package three-dimensional human beings and their complicated lives into easily accessible types and smoothly digestible narratives.
Compton is a strong writer, switching between third and first person, sometimes quite sneakily and without warning, mid-chapter. He doesn't engage in any hand-holding: the reader must figure out this world on their own with no explanatory passages to help them along. Nor does he make his characters easy to empathize with: he forces readers to get to know them over time, to slowly understand them, until empathy is finally reached.
I loved this book! It is not a book that particularly wants to be loved, what with its cold critique of modern society and its very frequent examples of toxic, judgmental human pettiness and its portrait of a media and a medical world that not only don't care for you on a human level but are also all too willing to exploit and draw out your pain if they can make a few bucks off of you. The book would probably be very uncomfortable with my open declaration of love, so I will revise that to say: I really respected this book. It is not a cold book, despite its acidity and its scathing critiques.
The book gives you scattered but very moving reminders that there is decency and kindness in humanity, whether in the form of a colleague who should be considered a best friend (gay, of course) or an ex-husband who was the right person at the wrong time or an eccentric elderly stranger who will do what he can to help people in need. Key to the book's success is that it makes clear that both the ambitious young fellow who is predatorily recording Katherine Mortenhoe and, much more importantly, that Katherine herself are special. They deserve to be seen as special, treated as special. Their lives, their loves, their failings and their virtues, their ability to understand and connect with each other and with themselves, their dreams and the reality that they have to cope with are what makes them so. Everyone's lives makes this so.
When is Science Fiction not Science Fiction? When it's New Wave Science Fiction of course! The science fictional trappings of this novel are simply that: trappings. Although this novel is quite definitively set in a future world, it may as well have been set in 1973, when it was first written, or in the right now of 2019. Everything in this book was relevant then as it is relevant now. From the personal made public and lack of privacy in general to medical duplicity to cookie cutter novels designed to fit their audience's needs to the greedy interest that reality tv programming has in viewing and judging personal lives while simultaneously trying to transform and package three-dimensional human beings and their complicated lives into easily accessible types and smoothly digestible narratives.
Compton is a strong writer, switching between third and first person, sometimes quite sneakily and without warning, mid-chapter. He doesn't engage in any hand-holding: the reader must figure out this world on their own with no explanatory passages to help them along. Nor does he make his characters easy to empathize with: he forces readers to get to know them over time, to slowly understand them, until empathy is finally reached.
I loved this book! It is not a book that particularly wants to be loved, what with its cold critique of modern society and its very frequent examples of toxic, judgmental human pettiness and its portrait of a media and a medical world that not only don't care for you on a human level but are also all too willing to exploit and draw out your pain if they can make a few bucks off of you. The book would probably be very uncomfortable with my open declaration of love, so I will revise that to say: I really respected this book. It is not a cold book, despite its acidity and its scathing critiques.
The book gives you scattered but very moving reminders that there is decency and kindness in humanity, whether in the form of a colleague who should be considered a best friend (gay, of course) or an ex-husband who was the right person at the wrong time or an eccentric elderly stranger who will do what he can to help people in need. Key to the book's success is that it makes clear that both the ambitious young fellow who is predatorily recording Katherine Mortenhoe and, much more importantly, that Katherine herself are special. They deserve to be seen as special, treated as special. Their lives, their loves, their failings and their virtues, their ability to understand and connect with each other and with themselves, their dreams and the reality that they have to cope with are what makes them so. Everyone's lives makes this so.
“Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.”
― Alan Moore
October 30, 2019
A 1970s spec classic reissued with a fresh tonguing from Jeff Vandermeer. Set in a dystopic future (this one), where the pain-starved public crave reality shows about the moribund, eager to soak up their final croaks, stiff romance novel editor Katherine Mortenhoe is told about her terminus by a seedy doc in the pockets of a Murdoch-like TV empire. Split between a first-person account of human camera Roddie, tailing the heroine, and third-person narration of the arch and quick-witted Katherine, the novel is a smart suckerpunch to the amoral digital age of the time, an age enhanced tenfold since the seventies, and like the finest spec novels, has predicted the boorishness of the future (the handling of reality TV figure Jade Goody’s terminal cancer was a shameful intrusion on the dignity of dying). Compton’s prose is not sensational but seriously above-par for a spec dealer.
July 9, 2016
Most, if not all, of us have seen part of or even a whole episode of a reality show. Even though of us that avoid the Real Housewives series like the plague have watched shows on HGTV, a cooking show, or even a show like Deadliest Catch. Whether or not we still watch them is a different story, but odds are you have seen part of a reality show sometime. At their best, reality shows are educational – cooking show for instance, or blended with competition – like say some cooking shows or the Amazing Race. At their worst, reality shows reveal the lowest common denominator of human existence. It is not just the people who go on such programs (though why a father who goes on a show like the Bachelor isn’t considered unfit, I don’t know), but the audience as well.
At some level, people watch reality programs to feel superior, to judge, to feel better about their lives. I may not be rich like so-so but at least my children are not spoiled brats and so on. At times, the audience may feel empathy, but that sense of superiority is usually present. What is worse, because the term cast is used to describe those on reality shows, there is a belief that everything about them should be made common knowledge.
Even more damning in today’s age of social media that is starting to be true about everyone. At times, I am amazed at what some people post on sites like Face book. I don’t understand why the minute someone leaves home they have to tweet about how they just got on the bus. Who cares? Eventually, because people are human, the tweeter is going to do something stupid. Watch out for the human sharks then. People start to complain about the lack of privacy (and some of us joke at it, I sometimes use a network called NSA surveillance), yet, the more I think about it, it seems my friend is right as well. It is both a lack of privacy, but also a lack of empathy.
I hated shows like Funniest Home Videos because for every truly funny cat or dog video, there was a video of someone with toilet paper stuck to his/her bum dancing at a wedding. Why didn’t the recorder tell the person? Why when someone falls, everyone pulls out camera so to record but does nothing? I can understand if there is gunfire, but surely helping the person out of the fountain would be the empathic thing to do. We are do embarrassing and not so nice shit. What gives anyone the right to broadcast us at a stupid moment? It isn’t even just letting the man die outside the 7-11 or in the street; it’s not helping the woman who crashed her bike. I’m not talking about “snitching” for that is a whole host of issues; I just mean common empathy and politeness. Holding the door open, saying thank you or good morning. Not rushing to judgment.
Which in many ways is what this book is about.
Written in the 70s, the Continuous Katherine describes a society that is not to far removed from our own. There have been reality “stars” that have died on television. In this book, one woman doesn’t want to die in public but in private. The media and its viewership does not want to let her do that, and in fact, the media has an ace up its sleeve. A certain network has discovered a very interesting way to use cameras. What then follows is a critical look at both media and the society that consumes it.
The book does have its flaws. There is a road trip that goes on a bit too long, though it also includes a good bit about class and underclass. There are a couple of sequences that while the reader will understand why they are there, the novel could have also done without them.
The most brilliant aspect of the novel is the use of two primary narrative points of views – Katherine’s and a reporter’s.
One of the most well crafted aspects of the novel is the use of empathy or to be more exact the use of lack of empathy. This is something that Katherine herself at the start of the novel has. She isn’t described as the iconoclast or the rebel. She is simply a person, a cog. She is normal. She is every day. The story might under fold a slightly different way were she a he, after all society does judge the genders differently. The empathy theme is used most wonderfully and thought provoking with the use of the public, those that consume the media. After all, the media needs us. If we are going to blame the media for what we are, Compton seems to be saying, we must remember our role in it as well. Not only that but how those around a person respond to such fame.
Of course, the book is also about how we respond to death as well as a look at how closely things become tied together.
Seriously, this book will make you think and it is still timely. It will make you think about empathy.
(Note - July 2016 NYRB Book of the Month)
At some level, people watch reality programs to feel superior, to judge, to feel better about their lives. I may not be rich like so-so but at least my children are not spoiled brats and so on. At times, the audience may feel empathy, but that sense of superiority is usually present. What is worse, because the term cast is used to describe those on reality shows, there is a belief that everything about them should be made common knowledge.
Even more damning in today’s age of social media that is starting to be true about everyone. At times, I am amazed at what some people post on sites like Face book. I don’t understand why the minute someone leaves home they have to tweet about how they just got on the bus. Who cares? Eventually, because people are human, the tweeter is going to do something stupid. Watch out for the human sharks then. People start to complain about the lack of privacy (and some of us joke at it, I sometimes use a network called NSA surveillance), yet, the more I think about it, it seems my friend is right as well. It is both a lack of privacy, but also a lack of empathy.
I hated shows like Funniest Home Videos because for every truly funny cat or dog video, there was a video of someone with toilet paper stuck to his/her bum dancing at a wedding. Why didn’t the recorder tell the person? Why when someone falls, everyone pulls out camera so to record but does nothing? I can understand if there is gunfire, but surely helping the person out of the fountain would be the empathic thing to do. We are do embarrassing and not so nice shit. What gives anyone the right to broadcast us at a stupid moment? It isn’t even just letting the man die outside the 7-11 or in the street; it’s not helping the woman who crashed her bike. I’m not talking about “snitching” for that is a whole host of issues; I just mean common empathy and politeness. Holding the door open, saying thank you or good morning. Not rushing to judgment.
Which in many ways is what this book is about.
Written in the 70s, the Continuous Katherine describes a society that is not to far removed from our own. There have been reality “stars” that have died on television. In this book, one woman doesn’t want to die in public but in private. The media and its viewership does not want to let her do that, and in fact, the media has an ace up its sleeve. A certain network has discovered a very interesting way to use cameras. What then follows is a critical look at both media and the society that consumes it.
The book does have its flaws. There is a road trip that goes on a bit too long, though it also includes a good bit about class and underclass. There are a couple of sequences that while the reader will understand why they are there, the novel could have also done without them.
The most brilliant aspect of the novel is the use of two primary narrative points of views – Katherine’s and a reporter’s.
One of the most well crafted aspects of the novel is the use of empathy or to be more exact the use of lack of empathy. This is something that Katherine herself at the start of the novel has. She isn’t described as the iconoclast or the rebel. She is simply a person, a cog. She is normal. She is every day. The story might under fold a slightly different way were she a he, after all society does judge the genders differently. The empathy theme is used most wonderfully and thought provoking with the use of the public, those that consume the media. After all, the media needs us. If we are going to blame the media for what we are, Compton seems to be saying, we must remember our role in it as well. Not only that but how those around a person respond to such fame.
Of course, the book is also about how we respond to death as well as a look at how closely things become tied together.
Seriously, this book will make you think and it is still timely. It will make you think about empathy.
(Note - July 2016 NYRB Book of the Month)
June 16, 2020
DAW Collectors #102
Cover Artist: Karel Thole
Name: Compton, David Guy, Birthplace: London, England, UK, 19 August 1930.
While the benefits of disease eradication are oft desired, the ramifications of such a world are not hard to imagine: overpopulation, senescence, entropy. Speculative fiction has played with this trope for ages, resulting in stories that span from the optimistic to the apocalyptic to the zombie apocalyptic. Some might argue that it’s overdone, but that doesn’t stop writers from continuing the trend, because it’s something we all want, we don’t have, and we should fear what we don’t have because we might not ever have it or understand it, and also vaccinations might cause zombies.
Katherine Mortenhoe is a middle-aged computabook programmer, a The blurb says she’s young and beautiful, but blurbs are usually stupid and this one is overdramatized and misleading.) She learns that she has four weeks to live, and NTV wants to film her last days for the popular Human Destinies reality TV show. Rod is hired to film her with his surgically-implanted TV camera eyes, “the world’s morbid curiosity made flesh” (p. 203), but Katherine would rather die in peace, and off-camera, and Rod would rather earn his big paycheck without betraying and humiliating the dying Katherine Mortenhoe. Instead, Rod befriends Katherine while she’s on the run from NTV, and they develop a strange, tense friendship based on her need for love and care, and his need to overcome the guilt of his duplicity.
Compton’s simple prose is loaded with characterization. Somehow, the voicing comes alive, even for the supporting characters.
The book is also known as "The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe".
Cover Artist: Karel Thole
Name: Compton, David Guy, Birthplace: London, England, UK, 19 August 1930.
While the benefits of disease eradication are oft desired, the ramifications of such a world are not hard to imagine: overpopulation, senescence, entropy. Speculative fiction has played with this trope for ages, resulting in stories that span from the optimistic to the apocalyptic to the zombie apocalyptic. Some might argue that it’s overdone, but that doesn’t stop writers from continuing the trend, because it’s something we all want, we don’t have, and we should fear what we don’t have because we might not ever have it or understand it, and also vaccinations might cause zombies.
Katherine Mortenhoe is a middle-aged computabook programmer, a The blurb says she’s young and beautiful, but blurbs are usually stupid and this one is overdramatized and misleading.) She learns that she has four weeks to live, and NTV wants to film her last days for the popular Human Destinies reality TV show. Rod is hired to film her with his surgically-implanted TV camera eyes, “the world’s morbid curiosity made flesh” (p. 203), but Katherine would rather die in peace, and off-camera, and Rod would rather earn his big paycheck without betraying and humiliating the dying Katherine Mortenhoe. Instead, Rod befriends Katherine while she’s on the run from NTV, and they develop a strange, tense friendship based on her need for love and care, and his need to overcome the guilt of his duplicity.
Compton’s simple prose is loaded with characterization. Somehow, the voicing comes alive, even for the supporting characters.
The book is also known as "The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe".
July 8, 2019
I have finally found time to reread this novel before posting about it, and the second time through opened my eyes to much more than I found the first time. This book was my real-world book group's read at the end of June; it is also one of the most thought-provoking novels I've read in a long while. Written in 1974, and alternatively titled The Unsleeping Eye, it seems almost prescient, as it deals with issues that are at the center of debate forty-plus years later. It's also a book I can certainly recommend.
https://www.readingavidly.com/2019/07...
As Jeff VanderMeer says in his introduction, the future in which the novel is set is
"an uncanny mirror of our own, of an age in which everyone really is a camera eye, or at least carries one around in his pocket."
While there is a great focus on the overreach of technology and reality television, which caused no end of discussion with the ladies in my book group, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a very human novel at its core. It unravels slowly to eventually become a story of not just death and dying, but also of relationships in a society where everything is driven by technology. It not only asks how well can we truly know someone, but at its heart is, again quoting VanderMeer from the intro,
"a portrait of an intelligent, middle-aged woman grappling with the ultimate existential crisis: How does one conduct oneself while dying?"
It was difficult to put down once I started reading, and it's also not hard to imagine while reading that yesterday's fiction has become today's reality, which for me in this particular instance is a rather disturbing thought.
https://www.readingavidly.com/2019/07...
As Jeff VanderMeer says in his introduction, the future in which the novel is set is
"an uncanny mirror of our own, of an age in which everyone really is a camera eye, or at least carries one around in his pocket."
While there is a great focus on the overreach of technology and reality television, which caused no end of discussion with the ladies in my book group, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a very human novel at its core. It unravels slowly to eventually become a story of not just death and dying, but also of relationships in a society where everything is driven by technology. It not only asks how well can we truly know someone, but at its heart is, again quoting VanderMeer from the intro,
"a portrait of an intelligent, middle-aged woman grappling with the ultimate existential crisis: How does one conduct oneself while dying?"
It was difficult to put down once I started reading, and it's also not hard to imagine while reading that yesterday's fiction has become today's reality, which for me in this particular instance is a rather disturbing thought.
November 30, 2016
First something I must get off my chest: I heartily dislike the new goodreads homepage. It’s far too busy, I much preferred the less cluttered old version. Secondly, this is a short novel and only took me three days to read because it is, pardon my French, grim as fuck. A bitterer, more cynical sci-fi novel I have rarely come across. The conceit is as follows: Katherine Mortenhoe is diagnosed with a terminal illness that will kill her in mere weeks. As such illnesses are vanishingly rare, she immediately becomes a celebrity and is hounded by the media. A man with TV cameras in his eyes follows her around, trying to make a reality TV show about her. Although there is a dark humour about all this, it’s a nasty, angry sort of humour that isn’t really funny. The writing is at times witty, yet never in a light-hearted fashion. For example this moment when Katherine has just been diagnosed and phones a church.
This novel (which has also been published under the name The Unsleeping Eye) first came out in 1974 and reads as unsettlingly prescient. The voyeuristic media obsession with unusual categories of suffering and the pervasiveness of reality TV are foreseen very clearly. Many background details of world-building seem entirely too convincing: tokenistic privacy laws, rampant inequality, and constant protest marches that are ignored and disregarded. The book has aged pretty well as the focus is on social change, not technological. It’s a particularly cynical analysis of social and individual psychology. Despite the proximity of Katherine to the reader - the point of view is split between her and the cameraman - it’s hard to sympathise with her as a person. The narrative places you in such a similar position to those watching her dying on TV that reading about her becomes uncomfortable. Knowing how she feels seems voyeuristic, a clever effect to pull off in a novel.
‘The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe’ is a smart book, albeit one shot through with both petty and grand cruelties and seemingly determined to undermine the reader’s faith in humanity. It is a powerful and memorable piece of fiction, but not at all pleasant to read. It was no surprise to find the ending just as depressing as the rest. Thus I can only give it three stars.
"Vicar Pemberton speaking."
So then it was too late for her to change her mind. "I’m going to die," she said.
"You wouldn’t have rung me if you really believed that. What have you taken?"
"I’ve taken umbrage."
This novel (which has also been published under the name The Unsleeping Eye) first came out in 1974 and reads as unsettlingly prescient. The voyeuristic media obsession with unusual categories of suffering and the pervasiveness of reality TV are foreseen very clearly. Many background details of world-building seem entirely too convincing: tokenistic privacy laws, rampant inequality, and constant protest marches that are ignored and disregarded. The book has aged pretty well as the focus is on social change, not technological. It’s a particularly cynical analysis of social and individual psychology. Despite the proximity of Katherine to the reader - the point of view is split between her and the cameraman - it’s hard to sympathise with her as a person. The narrative places you in such a similar position to those watching her dying on TV that reading about her becomes uncomfortable. Knowing how she feels seems voyeuristic, a clever effect to pull off in a novel.
‘The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe’ is a smart book, albeit one shot through with both petty and grand cruelties and seemingly determined to undermine the reader’s faith in humanity. It is a powerful and memorable piece of fiction, but not at all pleasant to read. It was no surprise to find the ending just as depressing as the rest. Thus I can only give it three stars.
July 12, 2019
elyunquedehefesto.blogspot.com/2019/0...
Hay novelas que tras un intenso brillo después de su publicación, incluso con adaptación cinematográfica como en este caso, tienden a ir cayendo en el olvido. Afortunadamente, gracias a Gallo Negro Ediciones, ahora podemos redescubrir esta maravilla escrita por Compton en 1974.
Y es que se trata de una distopía diferente. Aquí lo más importante no es el mundo que recrea, muy similar al nuestro excepto en el hecho de que la ciencia ha ganado la partida a la muerte y son muy escasos los fallecimientos. Lo más importante es la manera en que esa perspectiva afecta a la sociedad y en concreto a personas como los dos protagonistas principales, demasiado sensibles para adaptarse y que han desarrollado sus propios mecanismos de defensa para seguir adelante. Todo gira en torno a Katherine Mortenhoe, una mujer de 44 años a la que se diagnostica una muerte inminente y Roddie “Jack” Patterson, un periodista que se refugia en su trabajo hasta el punto de implantarse cámaras en los ojos y así poder huir de una vida personal que le supera.
La sociedad descrita da la impresión de no tener rumbo fijo. Esa percepción de vidas cuasi interminables ha provocado que las uniones de pareja se realicen mediante contratos renovables y que la gente no tenga motivaciones realmente importantes más allá de vivir el momento. Pero también les ha insensibilizado originando una insatisfacción latente que desemboca en continuas protestas por cualquier motivo que canalice su malestar, y ha generado una mayoría de personas con los nervios a flor de piel, dispuestos a ensañarse con quien les pueda servir de desahogo. La muerte se ha convertido en el gran espectáculo, un fenómeno televisivo de puro amarillismo que explota el morbo y el dolor. Los periodistas son chacales y el peor de ellos Vincent, el jefe de Roddie y productor del programa que pretende tener a Katherine como objetivo.
La novela alterna la primera persona cuando nos centramos en Roddie (para poder entender mejor lo que pasa por su cabeza), y un narrador omnisciente. Así vamos descubriendo a una Katherine bastante anodina, que ha rehuido cualquier posibilidad de éxito en la vida para mantener un perfil bajo que le sirva de escudo y a un “Jack” que, desde el escepticismo inicial, irá conociendo a la verdadera mujer, acompañándola en sus diferentes fases de aceptación y posterior rebeldía y recuperando a su vez su propia humanidad. En un mundo así, los inadaptados como ellos son los únicos que, bajo determinadas circunstancias, pueden mostrar algo de bondad.
No es una obra alegre. Los villanos son mayoría. Hay doctores de doble moral que venderían una vida fingiendo integridad y ricos que pasan sus días entregados a perversiones varias. Pero también buenas personas, algunos viviendo al margen de la sociedad y otros que aún recuerdan lo que es amar. Enfrentarse a la muerte es el mejor motivo para hacer balance y comprender tu propia vida, qué fue mal y donde se quedó aquel tren del que te bajaste. Y a veces se necesita a alguien a tu lado para retornar a ese punto y afrontarlo, como Katherine necesita a Roddie.
Hay novelas que tras un intenso brillo después de su publicación, incluso con adaptación cinematográfica como en este caso, tienden a ir cayendo en el olvido. Afortunadamente, gracias a Gallo Negro Ediciones, ahora podemos redescubrir esta maravilla escrita por Compton en 1974.
Y es que se trata de una distopía diferente. Aquí lo más importante no es el mundo que recrea, muy similar al nuestro excepto en el hecho de que la ciencia ha ganado la partida a la muerte y son muy escasos los fallecimientos. Lo más importante es la manera en que esa perspectiva afecta a la sociedad y en concreto a personas como los dos protagonistas principales, demasiado sensibles para adaptarse y que han desarrollado sus propios mecanismos de defensa para seguir adelante. Todo gira en torno a Katherine Mortenhoe, una mujer de 44 años a la que se diagnostica una muerte inminente y Roddie “Jack” Patterson, un periodista que se refugia en su trabajo hasta el punto de implantarse cámaras en los ojos y así poder huir de una vida personal que le supera.
La sociedad descrita da la impresión de no tener rumbo fijo. Esa percepción de vidas cuasi interminables ha provocado que las uniones de pareja se realicen mediante contratos renovables y que la gente no tenga motivaciones realmente importantes más allá de vivir el momento. Pero también les ha insensibilizado originando una insatisfacción latente que desemboca en continuas protestas por cualquier motivo que canalice su malestar, y ha generado una mayoría de personas con los nervios a flor de piel, dispuestos a ensañarse con quien les pueda servir de desahogo. La muerte se ha convertido en el gran espectáculo, un fenómeno televisivo de puro amarillismo que explota el morbo y el dolor. Los periodistas son chacales y el peor de ellos Vincent, el jefe de Roddie y productor del programa que pretende tener a Katherine como objetivo.
La novela alterna la primera persona cuando nos centramos en Roddie (para poder entender mejor lo que pasa por su cabeza), y un narrador omnisciente. Así vamos descubriendo a una Katherine bastante anodina, que ha rehuido cualquier posibilidad de éxito en la vida para mantener un perfil bajo que le sirva de escudo y a un “Jack” que, desde el escepticismo inicial, irá conociendo a la verdadera mujer, acompañándola en sus diferentes fases de aceptación y posterior rebeldía y recuperando a su vez su propia humanidad. En un mundo así, los inadaptados como ellos son los únicos que, bajo determinadas circunstancias, pueden mostrar algo de bondad.
No es una obra alegre. Los villanos son mayoría. Hay doctores de doble moral que venderían una vida fingiendo integridad y ricos que pasan sus días entregados a perversiones varias. Pero también buenas personas, algunos viviendo al margen de la sociedad y otros que aún recuerdan lo que es amar. Enfrentarse a la muerte es el mejor motivo para hacer balance y comprender tu propia vida, qué fue mal y donde se quedó aquel tren del que te bajaste. Y a veces se necesita a alguien a tu lado para retornar a ese punto y afrontarlo, como Katherine necesita a Roddie.
March 10, 2025
D.G. Compton is a fine SF writer who teases the fantastic with a proper restraint, yet underlays his characters with a rare touch of soulful existential doubt and dismay, moving his Katherine Mortonhoes through the day-to-day in an England that may be leaning erroneously into dystopia where martyrs speak softly and take the exit door when nobody's looking. This is Compton playing Agnes Varda's 'Cleo from 5 to 7' as written for the UK New Wave and not the French. It's a blue and bittersweet novel, one that takes its time to establish a true connection (occasional narrator, Roddie, is clearly an asshole in the first 100 pages). These are not wholly likable or unlikable people really, but with a rare skill beyond the genre, Compton slowly turns the lenses on each character with his own version of slow glass, so the reader sees the suffering cast not as stock or pawn pieces, but some skewered reflection of one's selves. In essence it is a novel about perception (a reality TV precursor) and how to cope with perceptions that arrive when least expected.
I always felt that Compton writes in the territories between fellow genre scribes, J.G. Ballard and Christopher Priest, but with a pen bent less on destruction but focused more of deconstruction and what is left behind.
Katherine Mortonhoe is an editor at Computabook (notch AI authors writing romances), and is diagnosed with an illness that gives her 4 weeks to live. She unravels, of course, but instead of a wild weekend type of send-off, she silently withers away and finds herself contemplating her life at 44 years old as if she's been a vagrant to herself for decades. Should she renew her marriage to Harry, a man-boy who she really has nothing in common with, or hijack it to Tasmania for a solitary and decadent send-off, or simply go to a 'fringie' camp and wither away with all the raggy expats, political rebels, and others who have simply left the wheel? On Katherine's trail is a reporter, Roddie, who with cameras for eyes, plans at taking his journalism to the next level. It's really a simple book really. No fireworks. No dynamo set pieces. No conundrum with guns ablazing and hearts rendered afire. This is a novel about exploitation, celebrity, and the quiet loneliness that comes from living in a crowd where nobody knows your name, or really cares to. (a scene at an orgy unexpectedly broke my heart - how we truly think we're more important and more beautiful than the eyes of the masses).
A perfect book to read during the languid and cold month of Pisces, I have to applaud 'The Unsleeping Eye' as one of the unforgiving and heartfelt books of the 1970s, one that requires patience in order to engage these questionable characters who in the end still forget how to live (and with whom to live it with).
I always felt that Compton writes in the territories between fellow genre scribes, J.G. Ballard and Christopher Priest, but with a pen bent less on destruction but focused more of deconstruction and what is left behind.
Katherine Mortonhoe is an editor at Computabook (notch AI authors writing romances), and is diagnosed with an illness that gives her 4 weeks to live. She unravels, of course, but instead of a wild weekend type of send-off, she silently withers away and finds herself contemplating her life at 44 years old as if she's been a vagrant to herself for decades. Should she renew her marriage to Harry, a man-boy who she really has nothing in common with, or hijack it to Tasmania for a solitary and decadent send-off, or simply go to a 'fringie' camp and wither away with all the raggy expats, political rebels, and others who have simply left the wheel? On Katherine's trail is a reporter, Roddie, who with cameras for eyes, plans at taking his journalism to the next level. It's really a simple book really. No fireworks. No dynamo set pieces. No conundrum with guns ablazing and hearts rendered afire. This is a novel about exploitation, celebrity, and the quiet loneliness that comes from living in a crowd where nobody knows your name, or really cares to. (a scene at an orgy unexpectedly broke my heart - how we truly think we're more important and more beautiful than the eyes of the masses).
A perfect book to read during the languid and cold month of Pisces, I have to applaud 'The Unsleeping Eye' as one of the unforgiving and heartfelt books of the 1970s, one that requires patience in order to engage these questionable characters who in the end still forget how to live (and with whom to live it with).
July 28, 2016
I saw that Jeff VanderMeer had written the introduction for this, so I snagged it when it became available in Edelweiss for review.
I wasn't super into it. I think I was struggling to read it in the context of that time. Because reality tv is so pervasive now, it's almost a logical step to consider a reality show that follows a death. We have some of that already when people announce they are choosing assisted suicide, when news becomes reality tv. But considering that this is from the 1970s, it is very smart in predicting the future.
To me, this felt a bit like Philip K. Dick in tone. If you like him you are likely to enjoy this!
Thanks to Edelweiss for a chance to see the fresh release of this classic. I hadn't heard of the author before.
I wasn't super into it. I think I was struggling to read it in the context of that time. Because reality tv is so pervasive now, it's almost a logical step to consider a reality show that follows a death. We have some of that already when people announce they are choosing assisted suicide, when news becomes reality tv. But considering that this is from the 1970s, it is very smart in predicting the future.
To me, this felt a bit like Philip K. Dick in tone. If you like him you are likely to enjoy this!
Thanks to Edelweiss for a chance to see the fresh release of this classic. I hadn't heard of the author before.
February 7, 2017
It's a rare book that has both an NYRB Classics edition and an SF Masterwork edition, but don't let that raise your expectations: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe got reprinted by NYRB Classics because someone thought it could be pitched as one of those prescient works of science fiction that predicted a current trend, in this case reality television. It got the SF Masterwork edition, on the other hand, because the SF Masterwork collection is decidedly a mixed bag. The premise here is undercut by the setting, Compton fails at establishing the needed connection to the characters, and ultimately the work has nothing to say. People sometimes malign literary science fiction as pretentious and boring. I wouldn't offer The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe as a counterexample.
Let's state clearly that this work isn't prescient in the least. Reality television had been around for decades prior to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe's original publication in 1973, and there's never been a popular reality television show obsessed with the death of its subjects either. The closest you get is the schadenfreude of shows about hoarders and the morbidly obese, which as far as I'm aware have always had a small viewership compared to the competitive reality shows where people try to win fame, fortune, or love. So there's no real analogue to the show in the real world, and even in the setting of the book the premise of the show doesn't work. We are informed that people want to watch a show about Katherine Mortenhoe's final days because in the future people live to such old age and death is such a rarity that people have an insatiable unconscious hunger for death and suffering that the media caters to. But the book itself contradicts this premise with a setting that is still full of death and violence, with fatal car crashes, bombings, shootings, masked gangs wandering the countryside and assaulting drivers, and more. D.G. Compton evidently forgot the premise underpinning the driving plot of the book after the first fifty pages.
So the reasoning behind making this reality show starring the dying Katherine Mortenhoe doesn't make sense, but the book could still work if it made you care about Mortenhoe's demise or if the book had insights into death or the media that it could share. Unfortunately the book fails on both counts. You don't care about Mortenhoe's demise because you don't really care about the fates of any character in this book. Mortenhoe is presented initially as a rather unsympathetic hypochondriac who doesn't really love her husband but settled for him, who writes up computer programs that write books but never writes herself, who is condescending regarding her employee/only friend, who just generally isn't likable. Roderick (Roddie) is the reported assigned to cover Mortenhoe's downward spiral, who has recently had cameras implanted behind his eyes without seemingly ever considering the downsides to such a procedure (downsides which include the inability to sleep or experience darkness, a detail that makes no technological sense and that is added to shoehorn in some inorganic drama near the book's conclusion). The book is rounded out by such characters as a couple media executives without consciences, a doctor willing to sacrifice his client's wellbeing for money, a selfish and ultimately unfaithful husband, and others. Outside of Roddie's ex-wife, who puts up with her ex-husband for no discernible reason, a gay BFF cliché, and an old guy who does puppet shows, all the characters are the type of people you wouldn't mind seeing die in a fire. This is a problem where the approaching death of the main character is supposed to be an affecting journey, and this problem is only made worse when a race-against-time aspect is shoved into the narrative as well.
Even if it didn't make you care about Katherine's death, and sometimes in fact made you wish it could be sped up a bit, the book could still work if it had something interesting to say. But The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe has no wisdom to impart concerning death, or the media, or anything else that I can recall. We get a half-baked philosophy from Roddie on the need for continuous observation of a subject to truly know them, the natural endpoint for that philosophy would seem to me to be something like The Truman Show, but Roddie instead settles for following someone around for a week. The media in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a nigh-all-powerful entity that can command the police to assist in its television shows, so it isn't very similar to an actual television network, and besides some general points about the immorality of the business and its participants there aren't any insights here either. If you're looking for a book that contemplates death in an insightful way, don't look here, go read Jerusalem by Tavares, or Aniara by Martinson, or of course The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. Instead of interesting ideas, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe gives you passages like this:
Did I mention that the writing isn't very good? After that passage do I have to? The book is also rife with too-on-the-nose names, like the late night spot called Night Hawk’s, after the Hopper painting, or of course the name Mortenhoe. How clever.
Its main premise doesn't make sense, Compton fails to create the necessary bonds between reader and character, it doesn't say anything interesting, and it's not well written. It has other flaws too, but you get the gist. Despite the collections it is a part of, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is one you should skip.
Let's state clearly that this work isn't prescient in the least. Reality television had been around for decades prior to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe's original publication in 1973, and there's never been a popular reality television show obsessed with the death of its subjects either. The closest you get is the schadenfreude of shows about hoarders and the morbidly obese, which as far as I'm aware have always had a small viewership compared to the competitive reality shows where people try to win fame, fortune, or love. So there's no real analogue to the show in the real world, and even in the setting of the book the premise of the show doesn't work. We are informed that people want to watch a show about Katherine Mortenhoe's final days because in the future people live to such old age and death is such a rarity that people have an insatiable unconscious hunger for death and suffering that the media caters to. But the book itself contradicts this premise with a setting that is still full of death and violence, with fatal car crashes, bombings, shootings, masked gangs wandering the countryside and assaulting drivers, and more. D.G. Compton evidently forgot the premise underpinning the driving plot of the book after the first fifty pages.
So the reasoning behind making this reality show starring the dying Katherine Mortenhoe doesn't make sense, but the book could still work if it made you care about Mortenhoe's demise or if the book had insights into death or the media that it could share. Unfortunately the book fails on both counts. You don't care about Mortenhoe's demise because you don't really care about the fates of any character in this book. Mortenhoe is presented initially as a rather unsympathetic hypochondriac who doesn't really love her husband but settled for him, who writes up computer programs that write books but never writes herself, who is condescending regarding her employee/only friend, who just generally isn't likable. Roderick (Roddie) is the reported assigned to cover Mortenhoe's downward spiral, who has recently had cameras implanted behind his eyes without seemingly ever considering the downsides to such a procedure (downsides which include the inability to sleep or experience darkness, a detail that makes no technological sense and that is added to shoehorn in some inorganic drama near the book's conclusion). The book is rounded out by such characters as a couple media executives without consciences, a doctor willing to sacrifice his client's wellbeing for money, a selfish and ultimately unfaithful husband, and others. Outside of Roddie's ex-wife, who puts up with her ex-husband for no discernible reason, a gay BFF cliché, and an old guy who does puppet shows, all the characters are the type of people you wouldn't mind seeing die in a fire. This is a problem where the approaching death of the main character is supposed to be an affecting journey, and this problem is only made worse when a race-against-time aspect is shoved into the narrative as well.
Even if it didn't make you care about Katherine's death, and sometimes in fact made you wish it could be sped up a bit, the book could still work if it had something interesting to say. But The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe has no wisdom to impart concerning death, or the media, or anything else that I can recall. We get a half-baked philosophy from Roddie on the need for continuous observation of a subject to truly know them, the natural endpoint for that philosophy would seem to me to be something like The Truman Show, but Roddie instead settles for following someone around for a week. The media in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a nigh-all-powerful entity that can command the police to assist in its television shows, so it isn't very similar to an actual television network, and besides some general points about the immorality of the business and its participants there aren't any insights here either. If you're looking for a book that contemplates death in an insightful way, don't look here, go read Jerusalem by Tavares, or Aniara by Martinson, or of course The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. Instead of interesting ideas, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe gives you passages like this:
“The word stopped her. Even the Dial-A-Vicar had preferred to talk of failure and success, rather than sin and virtue. But she’d crawled out of antediluvian mud on the legs of curiosity, and descended from ancient trees in search of something more than survival.”
Did I mention that the writing isn't very good? After that passage do I have to? The book is also rife with too-on-the-nose names, like the late night spot called Night Hawk’s, after the Hopper painting, or of course the name Mortenhoe. How clever.
Its main premise doesn't make sense, Compton fails to create the necessary bonds between reader and character, it doesn't say anything interesting, and it's not well written. It has other flaws too, but you get the gist. Despite the collections it is a part of, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is one you should skip.
July 28, 2023
4 étoiles rien que pour l'émerveillement (le mien) d'avoir découvert un peu au hasard un roman des années 1970 écrit par un homme dont il s'avère qu'il est doté d'opinions de type "men are trash" ???? difficile de dire ce qui relève réellement d'une profonde misandrie chez notre cher D. G. Compton mais mon besoin de joie et d'espoir considère qu'il s'agit bel et bien là d'un engagement conscient de la part de l'auteur, et que c'est en toute lucidité qu'il s'attache à décrire les tares, l'égoïsme, la violence et la cruauté des hommes comme un fléau systémique et non un simple défaut de personnalité propre à quelques individus moins sympathiques que la moyenne. voyeurisme, égoïsme, instrumentalisation, autant de comportements de prédation dont Katherine Mortenhoe est la cible tout au long du roman, et dans lesquels il est très difficile (impossible) de ne pas retrouver le reflet des actes dont on a soi-même été la proie pendant des années !!!!!!!
sinon c'est très rigolo de lire de la SF écrite dans les années 1970 pck ils sont on point sur tout MAIS ils sont incapables de deviner qu'il y aura Internet pck en même temps qui aurait pu le deviner ??? du coup on a des univers franchement assez proches du nôtre et en même temps complètement parallèles et c'est fort plaisant ainsi que des barres.
la plume est pas à se renverser le coccyx à 90 degrés mais elle fait très bien le job, avec des jeux de mélange de narration et d'échos latents qui fonctionnent à merveille. petit banger qui arrive à dire "on vit dans une société" et "société du pestacle" sans être cliché ni relou, et à construire une intrigue de SF véritablement glaçante, originale, surprenante et entraînante, qui fait naviguer sur tous les rivages de la vie, jusqu'à l'horizon de la mort (eh ouais ma gueule)
sinon c'est très rigolo de lire de la SF écrite dans les années 1970 pck ils sont on point sur tout MAIS ils sont incapables de deviner qu'il y aura Internet pck en même temps qui aurait pu le deviner ??? du coup on a des univers franchement assez proches du nôtre et en même temps complètement parallèles et c'est fort plaisant ainsi que des barres.
la plume est pas à se renverser le coccyx à 90 degrés mais elle fait très bien le job, avec des jeux de mélange de narration et d'échos latents qui fonctionnent à merveille. petit banger qui arrive à dire "on vit dans une société" et "société du pestacle" sans être cliché ni relou, et à construire une intrigue de SF véritablement glaçante, originale, surprenante et entraînante, qui fait naviguer sur tous les rivages de la vie, jusqu'à l'horizon de la mort (eh ouais ma gueule)
September 6, 2025
This book has a good premise, beginning and ending - if I still cared by then. There are interesting thoughts and world building snippets, but the lack of connection to the (mostly unlikable) characters plus the sterile and passively uncomfortable atmosphere made me stop caring after a while; and that was already before some plot points happened that I really didn't care for. From the point Katherine begins to get away, the book started to lose me.
Reality TV really isnt the focus of the book, but it still comments on empathy and dignity. For me, a lot of that gets lost in a pretty muddled plot, though, and like I said, the style would have prevented this from being a favorite anyway.
Reality TV really isnt the focus of the book, but it still comments on empathy and dignity. For me, a lot of that gets lost in a pretty muddled plot, though, and like I said, the style would have prevented this from being a favorite anyway.
May 13, 2025
I didn’t initially expect much from this but it’s a fascinating take on surveillance, reality tv, and the private nature of suffering we deserve in our final moments. My fondness for this story grew immensely by the end and found myself getting misty eyed. My main issue with the book is the jumping between POVs, but the dual perspectives of Katherine and Roddie worked well overall. Great read!
August 10, 2016
This book is about a hundred pages too long. The first 2/3 was fascinating, utterly riveting. Then the main characters went on the run together and it deteriorated very quickly. The writing is good; the characters are excellent; the plotting is abysmal.
This book is almost universally described by readers as "the best science fiction I have ever read." If you are thinking about reading it you should know that there is actually precious little science fiction in it. The speculative elements that are there are remarkably prescient (e. g. reality tv...the book was written in the 1970s) but are entirely non-essential--and somewhat intrusive--to the storyline itself.
This book is almost universally described by readers as "the best science fiction I have ever read." If you are thinking about reading it you should know that there is actually precious little science fiction in it. The speculative elements that are there are remarkably prescient (e. g. reality tv...the book was written in the 1970s) but are entirely non-essential--and somewhat intrusive--to the storyline itself.
August 10, 2019
The NYRB gave this all-but-forgotten New Wave Sci-Fi classic its seal of approval with a re-issue a few years ago. Compton's story of a woman diagnosed with an incurable disease in a disease-free future touches on the balance between privacy rights and journalism, and also meditates on the larger issue of how well we can ever know our fellow humans. The story moves ponderously at times and has that 1970s stink about it but remains worth reading.
Read
September 6, 2025Hey all :) Here's the script to my video review, which you can watch (if you want) here: https://youtu.be/TRTD4RbbVBM
~~~
~~~
~~~
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe - D. G. Compton (1973)
Farewell, Earth’s Bliss was one of my favorite books I’ve read recently, so I knew I had to give D. G. Compton another go.
And even if his books were trash, I felt obligated to because what an incredible name. I had to commission a fake producer tag for him
- NOTE: Play the fake producer tag from Fiverr
Introduction
- Okay, sorry about that, let’s get into the book.
- The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe centers around Katherine Mortenhoe, a 44 year old editor. She gets diagnosed with a terminal illness with no way to be treated. She’ll die in 3 to 4 weeks at the most after some psychological and physical deterioration.
- The thing is, diagnoses like this are incredibly rare in Compton’s future. Because of medical progression, next to nobody is dying of anything before old age.
- That makes Katherine an instant celebrity, specifically in the sense that she’s getting calls from tons of TV producers wanting to film her final days on earth, reality-tv style.
- One such reporter is Roddie, our other main character. What’s unique about him is he got this camera implanted into his eyes such that everything he sees is streamed back to his TV station.
- The book swaps perspectives between Katherine and Roddie as Katherine tries to privately cope with her passing, but she is constantly accosted by TV men trying to profit off of her suffering, including Roddie.
- I could tell I liked this book from the first chapter, because for the time I was reading this book, I pretty much never stopped thinking about it. I was telling my friends and family about the themes and how it made me feel and I kept even going back to my notes when I wasn’t reading just to add more thoughts.
- The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe does what most great social science fiction does which is it presents this really morally intriguing scenario and forces you to sit with it. I loved it.
Dying
- Maybe the most basic of themes in this book is just the fact that yah, Katherine is dying. And that’s something we see her cope with in real time. “It was other people who died, not she” Katherine says.
- She starts off, understandably, flailing a little. She’s shocked about her diagnosis and struggles a bit with what to do about it. What does it even mean to be dead? To die? She learns that, “The concept was meaningless. Dead was dead. Utter. Incomprehensible. Dead was nowhere. Dead wasn’t coffins, mourners, crematories. Dead was an intolerable nowhere.”
- Soon, she enters a bit more of an acceptance phase and recognizes a certain freedom, in her eyes, that comes with dying.
- And with this acceptance comes some really, really astute observations. The one that really stuck was in the form of a conversation between Katherine and Roddie.
- Katherine talks about computers and how they don’t really know anything, they just transmit and redirect signals as they’re instructed.
- Roddie chimes in and is like, “yah yah, I understand” and Katherine is like, “no, ya don’t!” You understand these things in a theoretical sense in the same way a computer can “think” in a theoretical sense.
- You sometimes can’t understand the beauty of life, or the importance of family or whatever to that ultimate degree until you reach it under the distress of a traumatic position, like the dying position she is in.
- And this was the first time I ever heard something voiced like this in a book.
- It was this brilliant conversation that explained how sometimes it’s impossible for people to fully grasp something until, unfortunately, they don’t have much time left.
- And more broadly, it sometimes takes a crazy or even life-threatening event to force a thorough, true understanding of something to the point where it makes you change how you live. Like someone deciding to come clean after nearly ODing or someone changing how they treat people after they get broken up with.
- And this sort of backs up this personal belief that I have that I believe that most defining personality traits or radical beliefs that a person holds can be linked back to a small handful of life-changing events the person has had in their life
- ANYWAY, my point getting into all that was just to show you that this is the type of insightful intellectual maturity you can expect from Compton.
- It reminds me of Ballard, although it seems like Ballard thrives on the societal commentary where Compton seems more people-based and interpersonal, at least in what I’ve read.
- Anyway, there are also all these small side-quest scenes that explore other themes of death that don’t warrant each a deep dive but are thoroughly interesting.
- Like, Compton explores the morality or fulfillment of living out your last days in a euphoric but abnormal state induced by drugs.
- Katherine also calls her writings her “immortality”, which really hit deep with me, as I’m sure there’s an element of my content creation, whether on this channel or through things like my diary I write in every day, that is just me coping with death by feeling like I get to leave something behind.
Voyeurism
- This book had me questioning a lot of things all the way from the first chapter, when readers get to see Roddie view Katherine’s terminal diagnosis through a one-way mirror into the doctor’s office, and it feels so wrong to be a part of that.
- So, pretty obviously, this book is largely about the morality of media that could result in others’ suffering.
- And holy shit, is that fucking everywhere in society.
Voyeurism: I Am Awful
- Let me just use my own life for example.
- When I settle in for bed at night, I watch true crime YouTube, usually details on some particularly vile murder case.
- When I listen to music I’m probably listening to drill music, which perpetuates violence and when you listen to it, you’re pretty much listening to the soundtrack and background of gang warfare.
- But that’s not to say I don’t have a line. As an even more one-to-one comparison to this book, a lot of my friends watch TLC shows like My 600 Pound Life or My Strange Addiction, which are shows just monetizing addictions, eating disorders, OCD, etc. and that makes me sick.
- It fucking disgusts me that anyone would watch those shows. Shame on you - how could you support a network so blatantly profiting off of traumatic suffering.
- But wait, isn’t that just extremely hypocritical of me considering the stuff I just said I enjoy? Yep! 100%.
- And I could go on and on with these hypocrisies. I’m disgusted when mass shooters get their faces plastered all over the news because that’s what they want! Yet I made a video on the Unabomber Manifesto because I find his message interesting.
- I remember one content creator who got canceled online for releasing crime scene footage on her patreon. Is that so much worse than me looking at some blurred version or hearing graphic retellings? What about murderobelia? Etc. etc. I think there is a line, though.
- And that’s what I love about this book. You’re faced with this squarely awful situation and it’s impossible to read and not question how you do this in your own life.
Voyeurism: Cope
- Everyone’s got a line, and everyone’s got a reason as to why they are on the ethical side.
- And naturally, in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, the TV producers have plenty of reasons why their productions profiting off the suffering of unlucky victims is okay.
- One of the major justifications is that they do it without “trivializing” what they show. This is the same thing I hear the true crime YouTubers I watch say.
- They also justify the filming saying they’re just capturing “real human reactions. They [strike] home. They [are] without artifice, the ordinary reactions of ordinary people.”
- They claim that this is human nature, it’s an animal’s instinct to be attracted to and curious about tragedy and the macabre.
- And then for a lot of the book, Roddie talks about how guilty he feels covering Katherine’s demise, yet he still does it. Does that make him any better or is he just the same as someone who might *enjoy* filming her demise?
Voyeurism: Harassment
- I wanna touch on something tangentially related to voyeurism which is the constant and unsanctioned harassment Katherine receives.
- She was diagnosed with a tragic condition, and because of that, has to deal with these awful, blood-sucking newspeople who just want to milk her for content.
- All she wants to do is humbly live out her days in peace, but throughout the book she's constantly harassed.
- On an extreme end, it reminds me of gore, which, as a terminally-online GenZ-er, is literally impossible to completely avoid online.
- Any of these videos broadcasting tragedy, whether it’s tasteless, like, as a gore clip, or dressed up for a news segment, are completely nonconsensual on the victim’s side.
- There's this really painful moment in the book where a show broadcasts a naked Katherine and people watching let out ironic wolf-whistles. And there are plenty of other moments of people watching the footage, judging Katherine for everything.
- It made me so sick to read this because it’s exactly like those people online commenting on true crime or gore doing things like blaming the victim’s handling of the situation and stuff like that. I have seen so many fucking reddit videos of someone being gravely injured and commenters leaving some bullshit comment like “darwin awards” or “shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place!”
- It just reminds me of the fact, like Katherine, nobody consents to the bullshit we undergo in life. I didn’t ask to be born, yet I have people telling me if I don’t vote for this person I’m the devil or if I don’t recycle I’m the antichrist.
- Look, nobody asked to be here, so can we please just look upon each other with some fucking *grace*.
Conclusion
- I’ll be honest, I probably just took a lot of this shit and ran with it in my head, but the musing it provoked was why I liked this book so much.
- I’ll admit, there were some truly random things in this book that happened and I’m like, “what? Why did this story take a total left turn for a chapter?” But the emotion it invoked in me was more than enough to make up for that.
- There were also a lot of other smaller things that I loved that I feel like I need to at least mention.
- There’s this plot line of very wholesome, platonic love, which is a topic and relationship rarely highlighted in books I read and I think this was the best depiction I’ve read of it since I read The Left Hand of Darkness.
- Also, I just love Compton’s writing style. Compton writes in a way that makes me kinda smile, pleased. Whether it be an ironic joke or some clever phrasing and flow.
- This is a book I really wish I had read with my mom or a friend, because I’d love to hear someone else’s thoughts on this stuff, so I want to open the floor to you: I’m sincerely curious as to what my commenters out there think about the themes in this book:
- Where is the line for media that may take advantage of someone? How do you decide what media is okay to consume?
- I think it’s all really interesting stuff to think about.
- Thanks for watching
~~~
~~~
~~~
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe - D. G. Compton (1973)
Farewell, Earth’s Bliss was one of my favorite books I’ve read recently, so I knew I had to give D. G. Compton another go.
And even if his books were trash, I felt obligated to because what an incredible name. I had to commission a fake producer tag for him
- NOTE: Play the fake producer tag from Fiverr
Introduction
- Okay, sorry about that, let’s get into the book.
- The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe centers around Katherine Mortenhoe, a 44 year old editor. She gets diagnosed with a terminal illness with no way to be treated. She’ll die in 3 to 4 weeks at the most after some psychological and physical deterioration.
- The thing is, diagnoses like this are incredibly rare in Compton’s future. Because of medical progression, next to nobody is dying of anything before old age.
- That makes Katherine an instant celebrity, specifically in the sense that she’s getting calls from tons of TV producers wanting to film her final days on earth, reality-tv style.
- One such reporter is Roddie, our other main character. What’s unique about him is he got this camera implanted into his eyes such that everything he sees is streamed back to his TV station.
- The book swaps perspectives between Katherine and Roddie as Katherine tries to privately cope with her passing, but she is constantly accosted by TV men trying to profit off of her suffering, including Roddie.
- I could tell I liked this book from the first chapter, because for the time I was reading this book, I pretty much never stopped thinking about it. I was telling my friends and family about the themes and how it made me feel and I kept even going back to my notes when I wasn’t reading just to add more thoughts.
- The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe does what most great social science fiction does which is it presents this really morally intriguing scenario and forces you to sit with it. I loved it.
Dying
- Maybe the most basic of themes in this book is just the fact that yah, Katherine is dying. And that’s something we see her cope with in real time. “It was other people who died, not she” Katherine says.
- She starts off, understandably, flailing a little. She’s shocked about her diagnosis and struggles a bit with what to do about it. What does it even mean to be dead? To die? She learns that, “The concept was meaningless. Dead was dead. Utter. Incomprehensible. Dead was nowhere. Dead wasn’t coffins, mourners, crematories. Dead was an intolerable nowhere.”
- Soon, she enters a bit more of an acceptance phase and recognizes a certain freedom, in her eyes, that comes with dying.
- And with this acceptance comes some really, really astute observations. The one that really stuck was in the form of a conversation between Katherine and Roddie.
- Katherine talks about computers and how they don’t really know anything, they just transmit and redirect signals as they’re instructed.
- Roddie chimes in and is like, “yah yah, I understand” and Katherine is like, “no, ya don’t!” You understand these things in a theoretical sense in the same way a computer can “think” in a theoretical sense.
- You sometimes can’t understand the beauty of life, or the importance of family or whatever to that ultimate degree until you reach it under the distress of a traumatic position, like the dying position she is in.
- And this was the first time I ever heard something voiced like this in a book.
- It was this brilliant conversation that explained how sometimes it’s impossible for people to fully grasp something until, unfortunately, they don’t have much time left.
- And more broadly, it sometimes takes a crazy or even life-threatening event to force a thorough, true understanding of something to the point where it makes you change how you live. Like someone deciding to come clean after nearly ODing or someone changing how they treat people after they get broken up with.
- And this sort of backs up this personal belief that I have that I believe that most defining personality traits or radical beliefs that a person holds can be linked back to a small handful of life-changing events the person has had in their life
- ANYWAY, my point getting into all that was just to show you that this is the type of insightful intellectual maturity you can expect from Compton.
- It reminds me of Ballard, although it seems like Ballard thrives on the societal commentary where Compton seems more people-based and interpersonal, at least in what I’ve read.
- Anyway, there are also all these small side-quest scenes that explore other themes of death that don’t warrant each a deep dive but are thoroughly interesting.
- Like, Compton explores the morality or fulfillment of living out your last days in a euphoric but abnormal state induced by drugs.
- Katherine also calls her writings her “immortality”, which really hit deep with me, as I’m sure there’s an element of my content creation, whether on this channel or through things like my diary I write in every day, that is just me coping with death by feeling like I get to leave something behind.
Voyeurism
- This book had me questioning a lot of things all the way from the first chapter, when readers get to see Roddie view Katherine’s terminal diagnosis through a one-way mirror into the doctor’s office, and it feels so wrong to be a part of that.
- So, pretty obviously, this book is largely about the morality of media that could result in others’ suffering.
- And holy shit, is that fucking everywhere in society.
Voyeurism: I Am Awful
- Let me just use my own life for example.
- When I settle in for bed at night, I watch true crime YouTube, usually details on some particularly vile murder case.
- When I listen to music I’m probably listening to drill music, which perpetuates violence and when you listen to it, you’re pretty much listening to the soundtrack and background of gang warfare.
- But that’s not to say I don’t have a line. As an even more one-to-one comparison to this book, a lot of my friends watch TLC shows like My 600 Pound Life or My Strange Addiction, which are shows just monetizing addictions, eating disorders, OCD, etc. and that makes me sick.
- It fucking disgusts me that anyone would watch those shows. Shame on you - how could you support a network so blatantly profiting off of traumatic suffering.
- But wait, isn’t that just extremely hypocritical of me considering the stuff I just said I enjoy? Yep! 100%.
- And I could go on and on with these hypocrisies. I’m disgusted when mass shooters get their faces plastered all over the news because that’s what they want! Yet I made a video on the Unabomber Manifesto because I find his message interesting.
- I remember one content creator who got canceled online for releasing crime scene footage on her patreon. Is that so much worse than me looking at some blurred version or hearing graphic retellings? What about murderobelia? Etc. etc. I think there is a line, though.
- And that’s what I love about this book. You’re faced with this squarely awful situation and it’s impossible to read and not question how you do this in your own life.
Voyeurism: Cope
- Everyone’s got a line, and everyone’s got a reason as to why they are on the ethical side.
- And naturally, in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, the TV producers have plenty of reasons why their productions profiting off the suffering of unlucky victims is okay.
- One of the major justifications is that they do it without “trivializing” what they show. This is the same thing I hear the true crime YouTubers I watch say.
- They also justify the filming saying they’re just capturing “real human reactions. They [strike] home. They [are] without artifice, the ordinary reactions of ordinary people.”
- They claim that this is human nature, it’s an animal’s instinct to be attracted to and curious about tragedy and the macabre.
- And then for a lot of the book, Roddie talks about how guilty he feels covering Katherine’s demise, yet he still does it. Does that make him any better or is he just the same as someone who might *enjoy* filming her demise?
Voyeurism: Harassment
- I wanna touch on something tangentially related to voyeurism which is the constant and unsanctioned harassment Katherine receives.
- She was diagnosed with a tragic condition, and because of that, has to deal with these awful, blood-sucking newspeople who just want to milk her for content.
- All she wants to do is humbly live out her days in peace, but throughout the book she's constantly harassed.
- On an extreme end, it reminds me of gore, which, as a terminally-online GenZ-er, is literally impossible to completely avoid online.
- Any of these videos broadcasting tragedy, whether it’s tasteless, like, as a gore clip, or dressed up for a news segment, are completely nonconsensual on the victim’s side.
- There's this really painful moment in the book where a show broadcasts a naked Katherine and people watching let out ironic wolf-whistles. And there are plenty of other moments of people watching the footage, judging Katherine for everything.
- It made me so sick to read this because it’s exactly like those people online commenting on true crime or gore doing things like blaming the victim’s handling of the situation and stuff like that. I have seen so many fucking reddit videos of someone being gravely injured and commenters leaving some bullshit comment like “darwin awards” or “shouldn’t have been doing that in the first place!”
- It just reminds me of the fact, like Katherine, nobody consents to the bullshit we undergo in life. I didn’t ask to be born, yet I have people telling me if I don’t vote for this person I’m the devil or if I don’t recycle I’m the antichrist.
- Look, nobody asked to be here, so can we please just look upon each other with some fucking *grace*.
Conclusion
- I’ll be honest, I probably just took a lot of this shit and ran with it in my head, but the musing it provoked was why I liked this book so much.
- I’ll admit, there were some truly random things in this book that happened and I’m like, “what? Why did this story take a total left turn for a chapter?” But the emotion it invoked in me was more than enough to make up for that.
- There were also a lot of other smaller things that I loved that I feel like I need to at least mention.
- There’s this plot line of very wholesome, platonic love, which is a topic and relationship rarely highlighted in books I read and I think this was the best depiction I’ve read of it since I read The Left Hand of Darkness.
- Also, I just love Compton’s writing style. Compton writes in a way that makes me kinda smile, pleased. Whether it be an ironic joke or some clever phrasing and flow.
- This is a book I really wish I had read with my mom or a friend, because I’d love to hear someone else’s thoughts on this stuff, so I want to open the floor to you: I’m sincerely curious as to what my commenters out there think about the themes in this book:
- Where is the line for media that may take advantage of someone? How do you decide what media is okay to consume?
- I think it’s all really interesting stuff to think about.
- Thanks for watching
Read
August 4, 2019DNF at 44%
January 3, 2018
I don't remember the word celebrity being used, but in some ways this novel is about celebrity, about how it's used for profit and how it's abused. Katherine Mortenhoe is a celebrity because she's going to die in middle age at a time in the near future when death by any cause except old age has been eliminated. She signs away her rights to privacy to a TV network that will broadcast coverage of her final days in exchange for a substantial payment leaving her husband comfortable. The personal and moral conflicts of the plot develop when she reneges on the agreement and flees the media attention.
Katherine and her extraordinary situation is the subject of the novel. But I found those trying to take advantage of her death to be more interesting. The reporter detailed to record her dying is a cyborg whose eyes have been converted to cameras providing a visual feed to his network. His unique ability unknown to Katherine, he joins her flight from the frenzy of attention surrounding her condition. His pov in alternating sections is almost equal to hers, and his increasing sympathy provides a tenderness offsetting the moral ambiguity of almost everyone else. These include Vincent the TV executive and the novel's evil center. Katherine's doctor, Mason, wants to gain fame from his proximity to her unusual medical circumstance. There are Katherine's 2 husbands. And there are the many types of people she and Roddie the reporter meet as they try to hide in the countryside, from bohemian dropouts on the fringe of society to upperclass swingers. For me, Katherine's desperation and spiraling symptoms were less engaging than the people trying to use her and her celebrity.
In the end it becomes a kind of road novel, a thrilling pursuit, with all the characters picking up or shedding various degrees of principle along the way.
Katherine and her extraordinary situation is the subject of the novel. But I found those trying to take advantage of her death to be more interesting. The reporter detailed to record her dying is a cyborg whose eyes have been converted to cameras providing a visual feed to his network. His unique ability unknown to Katherine, he joins her flight from the frenzy of attention surrounding her condition. His pov in alternating sections is almost equal to hers, and his increasing sympathy provides a tenderness offsetting the moral ambiguity of almost everyone else. These include Vincent the TV executive and the novel's evil center. Katherine's doctor, Mason, wants to gain fame from his proximity to her unusual medical circumstance. There are Katherine's 2 husbands. And there are the many types of people she and Roddie the reporter meet as they try to hide in the countryside, from bohemian dropouts on the fringe of society to upperclass swingers. For me, Katherine's desperation and spiraling symptoms were less engaging than the people trying to use her and her celebrity.
In the end it becomes a kind of road novel, a thrilling pursuit, with all the characters picking up or shedding various degrees of principle along the way.
January 19, 2015
Pre-empting reality TV, an intrusive media and a voyeuristic and hypocritical public are the themes explored here.
In the near future and most diseases have been eradicated, people only die when they get very old (or by accident). When someone actually becomes terminally ill before there time, they are of intense public interest and, to the right media tycoons, they are fit for exploitation. So dedicated to journalism and witnessing the truth, Roddie replaces his eyes with cameras so he is permanently filming what he sees and relaying it back to the office. Now he cannot sleep, must be kept permanently awake with drugs and must never find himself in darkness or else his inbuilt camera eyes will short circuit.
Katie Mortenhoe must radically re-assess her life after learning that she has less than a month to live. Her initial plans get derailed as she becomes the subject of intense public interest and finds out who her true friends are.
This story is both tragic and humorous, told with a good eye for character and human foibles. Definitely left me open to reading more of his work.
In the near future and most diseases have been eradicated, people only die when they get very old (or by accident). When someone actually becomes terminally ill before there time, they are of intense public interest and, to the right media tycoons, they are fit for exploitation. So dedicated to journalism and witnessing the truth, Roddie replaces his eyes with cameras so he is permanently filming what he sees and relaying it back to the office. Now he cannot sleep, must be kept permanently awake with drugs and must never find himself in darkness or else his inbuilt camera eyes will short circuit.
Katie Mortenhoe must radically re-assess her life after learning that she has less than a month to live. Her initial plans get derailed as she becomes the subject of intense public interest and finds out who her true friends are.
This story is both tragic and humorous, told with a good eye for character and human foibles. Definitely left me open to reading more of his work.
November 26, 2025
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a haunting novel that explores voyeurism of modern media. Written in 1974, reading it in 2025 makes me think - we didn’t learn. Considering that the main message of the novel is “look where are we heading into” “WARNING WARNING, society” it’s really deeply depressing.
This is near future dystopia, told from 3 main points of view - Kath, Rodd and the omniscient eye who observes them. In this world, where human suffering is scarce, a media company is using chronically ill and dying people for amusement. Not so different from today's reality shows on addictions, horrific struggles or true crime (where I am guilty as well of watching)....
The first thing that made an impression was, of course, the lack of consent in becoming a subject of this TV program. The second one is the “pain- starved” society and the detached gaze of it. Next - Kath's encounter with the outside world - a truly terrifying scene. And you must respect the determination and what follows in the journey that Katherine decides to take.
For me the novel it’s a pure critique of our obsession with media that exploits vulnerability and tragedy. What it means to be human in this unhuman time.
So, we have Kath, and we have Rodd - the reporter who interferes, and films Kath without her knowledge. He is a product of this environment. By his words - “I told you. I’m nobody’s nobody. The original outsider.”
I was left with very mixed feelings about him. He is very humanized in the novel: we see his motivation to become an active participant in this system, his past, his real life, his family, we read his thoughts and at first you empathize with him. Or at least I did.
“That then was the price, and that the satisfaction. I was public property, and utterly alone.”
I found it extremely interesting that her condition is depicted as analogous to sensory and informational overload, a phenomenon that parallels present-day experiences of digital burnout.
The tone and atmosphere reminded me of the feelings I had while watching Blade Runner. The coldness, the greyness, the isolation - yet you feel the compassion in the writing.
“Sometimes he was very close and sometimes he was so distant it made her want to cry. There were parts of his mind she didn’t know at all. Time was so short. She needed him, but more than that she needed to understand him. She needed to understand just one person before she died.”
I really liked the relationship between Rodd and Kath. The cruelty, the support and understanding, the care, the “love”. Honestly, Compton it’s truly skilled at dissecting the human psyche, showing you both the gritty and the beautiful in people.
“Somehow his interest in her didn’t fit. She didn’t give him power, she didn’t give him sex, even her suffering appeared to give him no kicks. It was almost as if she explained something to him, something he had been curious about all his life. Something that was its own justification. She caught herself out in her earlier sentimentality. Her nakedness had been the academic nakedness of the mortuary slab. That was why it hadn’t mattered. “
It was a great reminder that while we are present in someone else's journey to find themselves, to find peace, we can also find ourselves - here and now, what we were and what we are. While you can be hated by millions, one person can really see you. Because there are multiple versions of yourself. And as life, it’s truly complex - how the source of strength and suffering can be one.
“You see, beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They’re not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye. I had seen, my mind had seen, Katherine Mortenhoe with love. Had seen beauty. But my eyes had simply seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Had seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Period.”
Overall, this is not your flashy blinky sci-fi novel. It’s slow, it’s deeply human, it’s filled with messy situations and feelings. A depressing exploration of human dignity in the face of media intrusion. But that’s why I really loved the book. I truly hope to read it again in the future, to close it and be relieved that it is just a distant piece of fiction.
The soundtrack for this one: Mr. Kitty - Everything Will Be Okay
This is near future dystopia, told from 3 main points of view - Kath, Rodd and the omniscient eye who observes them. In this world, where human suffering is scarce, a media company is using chronically ill and dying people for amusement. Not so different from today's reality shows on addictions, horrific struggles or true crime (where I am guilty as well of watching)....
The first thing that made an impression was, of course, the lack of consent in becoming a subject of this TV program. The second one is the “pain- starved” society and the detached gaze of it. Next - Kath's encounter with the outside world - a truly terrifying scene. And you must respect the determination and what follows in the journey that Katherine decides to take.
For me the novel it’s a pure critique of our obsession with media that exploits vulnerability and tragedy. What it means to be human in this unhuman time.
So, we have Kath, and we have Rodd - the reporter who interferes, and films Kath without her knowledge. He is a product of this environment. By his words - “I told you. I’m nobody’s nobody. The original outsider.”
I was left with very mixed feelings about him. He is very humanized in the novel: we see his motivation to become an active participant in this system, his past, his real life, his family, we read his thoughts and at first you empathize with him. Or at least I did.
“That then was the price, and that the satisfaction. I was public property, and utterly alone.”
I found it extremely interesting that her condition is depicted as analogous to sensory and informational overload, a phenomenon that parallels present-day experiences of digital burnout.
The tone and atmosphere reminded me of the feelings I had while watching Blade Runner. The coldness, the greyness, the isolation - yet you feel the compassion in the writing.
“Sometimes he was very close and sometimes he was so distant it made her want to cry. There were parts of his mind she didn’t know at all. Time was so short. She needed him, but more than that she needed to understand him. She needed to understand just one person before she died.”
I really liked the relationship between Rodd and Kath. The cruelty, the support and understanding, the care, the “love”. Honestly, Compton it’s truly skilled at dissecting the human psyche, showing you both the gritty and the beautiful in people.
“Somehow his interest in her didn’t fit. She didn’t give him power, she didn’t give him sex, even her suffering appeared to give him no kicks. It was almost as if she explained something to him, something he had been curious about all his life. Something that was its own justification. She caught herself out in her earlier sentimentality. Her nakedness had been the academic nakedness of the mortuary slab. That was why it hadn’t mattered. “
It was a great reminder that while we are present in someone else's journey to find themselves, to find peace, we can also find ourselves - here and now, what we were and what we are. While you can be hated by millions, one person can really see you. Because there are multiple versions of yourself. And as life, it’s truly complex - how the source of strength and suffering can be one.
“You see, beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They’re not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye. I had seen, my mind had seen, Katherine Mortenhoe with love. Had seen beauty. But my eyes had simply seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Had seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Period.”
Overall, this is not your flashy blinky sci-fi novel. It’s slow, it’s deeply human, it’s filled with messy situations and feelings. A depressing exploration of human dignity in the face of media intrusion. But that’s why I really loved the book. I truly hope to read it again in the future, to close it and be relieved that it is just a distant piece of fiction.
The soundtrack for this one: Mr. Kitty - Everything Will Be Okay
December 27, 2014
Set in some unspecified time period in which people rarely die of illness, only of old age, such "unnatural" deaths are televised and have become a spectacle for an audience unused to such suffering. The book has been seen as a reaction to the intrusiveness of television and nascent reality TV programming; yet, in the end, it is predominantly a book about people and relationships in a particular near-future milieu.
Indeed, Katherine Mortenhoe doesn't even appear on television until half way through the book; and then it becomes clear that this isn't some modern, intense, immersive 24-hour reality show, but more in the nature of an hour or half-hour nightly documentary in which the audience is provided with edited highlights of the gradual deterioration and death of the subject.
Katherine Mortenhoe is to be filmed by Roddie, NTV's star reporter, who has made his own sacrifice to become even more relevant and useful in a televisual age; he has had his eyes replaced with cameras. Having secretly watched her when she was diagnosed with her - fanciful - terminal illness, Roddie is certain there is going to be more to Katherine Mortenhoe than a pitiful victim slowly dying in front of an eager audience; Roddie is eager to follow Katherine and discover the woman who will persist, despite the pain and suffering, over her last few days, the real person who continues to exist even through the horror of illness and death.
Roddie and Katherine become closer than either would have imagined as Roddie chases the continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, who has accepted her ultimate fate in death but refuses to accept her fate as surrogate for suffering and pain.
The narrative takes an interesting tack in terms of point of view. Roddie's point of view is told in first person; Katherine's story is told in third person. The continuous Katherine is distanced, as if seen through the lens; Roddie, the voyeur, the surrogate viewer, is immediate and here. When the novel is in third person, other, minor actors sometimes become the viewpoint character, as if they are also now part of the dramatised and continuous Katherine Mortenhoe; and towards the end of the novel there is a sense that sometimes an omniscient narrator takes over, who can see everybody in, and knows everything about, the unfolding drama. These movements between types of viewpoint play with the notion of subject and audience, of watcher and watched, of voyeurism and gaze in an interesting way.
Both Katherine and Roddie are well-developed characters, and even the minor characters are filled out enough for us to understand their motivations; particularly Katherine's husband and Roddie's boss at NTV. I also found Compton's writing style easy and enjoyable, with interesting turns of phrase.
Indeed, Katherine Mortenhoe doesn't even appear on television until half way through the book; and then it becomes clear that this isn't some modern, intense, immersive 24-hour reality show, but more in the nature of an hour or half-hour nightly documentary in which the audience is provided with edited highlights of the gradual deterioration and death of the subject.
Katherine Mortenhoe is to be filmed by Roddie, NTV's star reporter, who has made his own sacrifice to become even more relevant and useful in a televisual age; he has had his eyes replaced with cameras. Having secretly watched her when she was diagnosed with her - fanciful - terminal illness, Roddie is certain there is going to be more to Katherine Mortenhoe than a pitiful victim slowly dying in front of an eager audience; Roddie is eager to follow Katherine and discover the woman who will persist, despite the pain and suffering, over her last few days, the real person who continues to exist even through the horror of illness and death.
Roddie and Katherine become closer than either would have imagined as Roddie chases the continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, who has accepted her ultimate fate in death but refuses to accept her fate as surrogate for suffering and pain.
The narrative takes an interesting tack in terms of point of view. Roddie's point of view is told in first person; Katherine's story is told in third person. The continuous Katherine is distanced, as if seen through the lens; Roddie, the voyeur, the surrogate viewer, is immediate and here. When the novel is in third person, other, minor actors sometimes become the viewpoint character, as if they are also now part of the dramatised and continuous Katherine Mortenhoe; and towards the end of the novel there is a sense that sometimes an omniscient narrator takes over, who can see everybody in, and knows everything about, the unfolding drama. These movements between types of viewpoint play with the notion of subject and audience, of watcher and watched, of voyeurism and gaze in an interesting way.
Both Katherine and Roddie are well-developed characters, and even the minor characters are filled out enough for us to understand their motivations; particularly Katherine's husband and Roddie's boss at NTV. I also found Compton's writing style easy and enjoyable, with interesting turns of phrase.
June 10, 2018
I'd say closer to 3.5.
It’s taken me a while to compile my thoughts about this book, and though I’m not changing my rating of it, I’ve finally decided what it’s about as I see it. It seems there’s a consensus that the book is primarily about TV, and media, and the overwhelming power it has over our lives, and to some degree I concur. The world Katherine Mortenhoe inhabits is boring, placid, and uneventful, and so the story’s impact relies on that boredom. However, TV is just the catalyst in this case to represent the fundamental emptiness of the world and apparent personality of Katherine Mortenhoe, and the reason everyone (in the book) takes her journey.
Our male protagonist, Roddie, has signed his life away to a TV company. Undertaking an operation to have cameras inserted into his eyes, which subsequently don’t allow him to sleep (TV cannot miss a beat, you know) and which cause him deathly pain if closed for too long, he’s the ultimate 24-hour undercover agent. Getting your eyes hooked up so you can effectively spy on other people’s intimacy is pretty messed up, and Roddie doesn't think he has any connection to anyone anymore, so what the hell. He gets caught up this pursuance of Katherine (without her knowledge) after she discovers she's dying, and rather than trying to convince her to do the show, he works his way into her death.
So, reality shows are moulded for viewers. Scripted and edited to be shocking and leading, and ensure people’s natural curiosity (yes, we all have it, but some can’t seem to fight it very well) is well and truly grabbed by the proverbials. TCKM holds that assumption high. There is a big clue that Katherine Mortonhoe has been duped into believing herself into dying. Though this is a secret that Vincent (Roddie's's boss) is happy to protect for almost any amount of money, her doctor, having seen her flourish on the screen, and having guided her through her dying process in person, has his own morals squeezed to the point he is desperate to end the tragedy. This was actually one of the most interesting arcs that was only alluded to quite near the end.
But that secret is not what is driving the show - it is the genuine belief that Katherine is dying, at far too young an age, in a world where sickness has been eradicated until one is very old. She is an anomaly, and Vincent wants to make all the money he possibly can on her descent to the end. This is actually probably the weakest part of the story. I don’t think boredom can effectively be a strong enough reason for a TV show to have gone as far as it did, but nothing else I the world seemingly to have altered, and so the shaky premise I think is what keeps this at a three star.
So, the problem is, Katherine Mortenhoe, who is astonishingly normal and relatively boring it seems, is accepting this dying as another part of her uneventful life. But eventually even she cannot separate herself from the strange elevation and freedom this vision of dying brings, and she begins to act recklessly and unabashedly with (TV guy), doing things and seeing placed she very likely would never have done otherwise. We also start to see the different sides of Katherine from the perception of people like her father and her ex-husband. These insights into possibilities of what her life could have been, and what she could have experienced, but never had the drive to pursue due to the lack of fight in the population.
Along the same kind of vein (but not style) as The Outsider by Albert Camus, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a study on the discovery of life only when you have reached its end. Living life as if there is no meaning in anything until struggle finally catches up to you is not a new message, but that’s the point of the enduring human experience, it goes on as long as we do. Personally I think this is the most powerful message in the book, however, the obsession with reality TV is certainly raised as the sideshow of how low humanity has sunk. When the only way you can get your kicks is to watch people dying on TV, you’ve got a very sick society – without the actual, physical sickness to boot. Which is the point.
I’m a firm believer humans need struggle to find worth, strength and endurance, and forge strong communities. When you have nothing to fight for you have lost the ability to hope and strive, and so in that sense the book carries off the message well.
It’s taken me a while to compile my thoughts about this book, and though I’m not changing my rating of it, I’ve finally decided what it’s about as I see it. It seems there’s a consensus that the book is primarily about TV, and media, and the overwhelming power it has over our lives, and to some degree I concur. The world Katherine Mortenhoe inhabits is boring, placid, and uneventful, and so the story’s impact relies on that boredom. However, TV is just the catalyst in this case to represent the fundamental emptiness of the world and apparent personality of Katherine Mortenhoe, and the reason everyone (in the book) takes her journey.
Our male protagonist, Roddie, has signed his life away to a TV company. Undertaking an operation to have cameras inserted into his eyes, which subsequently don’t allow him to sleep (TV cannot miss a beat, you know) and which cause him deathly pain if closed for too long, he’s the ultimate 24-hour undercover agent. Getting your eyes hooked up so you can effectively spy on other people’s intimacy is pretty messed up, and Roddie doesn't think he has any connection to anyone anymore, so what the hell. He gets caught up this pursuance of Katherine (without her knowledge) after she discovers she's dying, and rather than trying to convince her to do the show, he works his way into her death.
So, reality shows are moulded for viewers. Scripted and edited to be shocking and leading, and ensure people’s natural curiosity (yes, we all have it, but some can’t seem to fight it very well) is well and truly grabbed by the proverbials. TCKM holds that assumption high. There is a big clue that Katherine Mortonhoe has been duped into believing herself into dying. Though this is a secret that Vincent (Roddie's's boss) is happy to protect for almost any amount of money, her doctor, having seen her flourish on the screen, and having guided her through her dying process in person, has his own morals squeezed to the point he is desperate to end the tragedy. This was actually one of the most interesting arcs that was only alluded to quite near the end.
But that secret is not what is driving the show - it is the genuine belief that Katherine is dying, at far too young an age, in a world where sickness has been eradicated until one is very old. She is an anomaly, and Vincent wants to make all the money he possibly can on her descent to the end. This is actually probably the weakest part of the story. I don’t think boredom can effectively be a strong enough reason for a TV show to have gone as far as it did, but nothing else I the world seemingly to have altered, and so the shaky premise I think is what keeps this at a three star.
So, the problem is, Katherine Mortenhoe, who is astonishingly normal and relatively boring it seems, is accepting this dying as another part of her uneventful life. But eventually even she cannot separate herself from the strange elevation and freedom this vision of dying brings, and she begins to act recklessly and unabashedly with (TV guy), doing things and seeing placed she very likely would never have done otherwise. We also start to see the different sides of Katherine from the perception of people like her father and her ex-husband. These insights into possibilities of what her life could have been, and what she could have experienced, but never had the drive to pursue due to the lack of fight in the population.
Along the same kind of vein (but not style) as The Outsider by Albert Camus, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a study on the discovery of life only when you have reached its end. Living life as if there is no meaning in anything until struggle finally catches up to you is not a new message, but that’s the point of the enduring human experience, it goes on as long as we do. Personally I think this is the most powerful message in the book, however, the obsession with reality TV is certainly raised as the sideshow of how low humanity has sunk. When the only way you can get your kicks is to watch people dying on TV, you’ve got a very sick society – without the actual, physical sickness to boot. Which is the point.
I’m a firm believer humans need struggle to find worth, strength and endurance, and forge strong communities. When you have nothing to fight for you have lost the ability to hope and strive, and so in that sense the book carries off the message well.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
April 7, 2018In the near future, society is on a slow verge of economic and environmental collapse, and medical science has advanced to the point where virtually no one dies except of old age. Discovering she has three weeks to live, Katherine Mortenhoe refuses to sell her story to a pain-starved public, and escaping the press and reality TV hounds flees to the anarchic borderlands beyond the city, followed by a reporter with cameras for eyes. It is…really good, prescient (this was written in the 70’s) about the increasing sacrifice of privacy and, more impressively, about death itself. Compton is a more than solid writer, especially for someone trucking in 70’s sci-fi, where a clever idea was more important than being able to write a sentence (I’m looking at you, Phillip K.) This works as adventure, as satire, and as a more profound comment on the complexity of personality and the need to live an authentic existence (whatever exactly that means) in the face of death and the media machine. Very good, I’ll definitely check out another Compton soon.
July 30, 2019
GR likens 2 stars to: "It was OK." That's a pretty spot-on description of my reaction. Maybe 2.5 stars because I actually liked the narrative voice, but it felt like such a fascinating premise was sort of wasted, or just fizzled out. Although, I did not feel quite as critical of the novel as Bbrown's review here on GR, he quite eloquently sums up many of my concerns here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1893441045?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1
February 24, 2017
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1973) by D.G. Compton is the best SF Masterwork I've read in months.
Reality TV is very popular these days. We can, if so inclined, choose to watch real people: competing over performance skills (The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent, etc), being affluent housewives (The Real Housewives of Cheshire, etc), working in a kitchen (Jamie's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, etc), working in a tattoo shop (Miami Ink, etc), driving on icy roads (Ice Road Truckers, etc), coping with teenage pregnancy and motherhood (16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, etc), buying and selling antiques (Bargain Hunt, etc), being affluent youngsters (Made in Chelsea, etc), going on dates (First Dates, The Undateables, etc), cleaning houses (How Clean Is Your House?, Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, etc), being poor (Benefits Britain, Benefits Street, Skint, etc), sharing a house (Big Brother), being in an airport and or on a plane (Airport, Airline, etc), buying and selling houses (Location, Location, Location, etc), being in hospital (24 Hours in A&E, etc), losing weight (The Biggest Loser, etc), or coping with medical problems (Embarrassing Bodies, etc). If that's all too exciting for us, we can instead watch people watching TV (Gogglebox).
I don't watch much TV; I don't have a TV license; I use DVDs, Netflix, 4OD, and BBC iPlayer if there's something I really want to watch. I had to use Wikipedia's lists of reality TV shows to research the above paragraph.
Back in the 70s, when Compton was writing The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, reality TV was only just appearing with a few experimental shows. These had a powerful effect on the popular imagination of the time, inspiring a range of SF writers, such as Compton.
In Katherine Mortenhoe's world, medical science has cured most illnesses, so most people die of old age or serious injuries (such as car crashes). Terminal illnesses are rare anomalies, and there's money to be made in filming rare anomalies and selling it to the public. Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal illness at the age of 44, giving her only 28 days to live, and must make tough choices about what to do with her remaining days, knowing that her privacy will be destroyed. It's quite a bleak book.
Compton writes well, and - to make a good point about the fake reality of reality TV - switches between third and first person narration: Katherine's story is narrated in the third person, telling us her actions but little of her thoughts; Roddie - 'The Man with the TV Eyes', a reporter with cameras in his eyes - narrates in the first person, giving his thoughts and his interpretation of Katherine's actions. Thus, Katherine's true character, her thoughts and goals, her inner life, are hidden from us: we have to figure it our for ourselves. The reader, like Roddie, like the viewers of reality TV, see only the external reality, missing out on all the inner complexity that makes people who they are. Our eyes may process the same images, but how we interpret them will differ.
'You see, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They're not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye.'
The story is gripping and well-written. The premise is brilliantly bleak. The main characters are well-rounded and memorable. The anti-TV message is one I can get behind. It is a very good book.
However, the novel's world is rather shallow: there are brief mentions of Privacy Laws (relating to when and where reporters can film), fringies (people who live on benefits on the fringes of society), Computabooks (computer-generated books), and various political protest marches occurring, but it is not explored in depth. We are given no clues as to what country, or how far in the future, the story is set. Beyond the TV Eyes, advanced medical science, and Computabooks, there is little to no mention of technological progress. This all dates the novel: with those few exceptions, our dystopian present looks far more futuristic than Mortenhoe's world. Perhaps the list of reality TV shows above demonstrates that our dystopian present is also more terrifying than Mortenhoe's world...
But this is not a book about a dystopian society, and should not be read as such. It is, and succeeds as, a story about a woman coming to terms with her imminent death, and a man trying to understand her. Recommended
Reality TV is very popular these days. We can, if so inclined, choose to watch real people: competing over performance skills (The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent, etc), being affluent housewives (The Real Housewives of Cheshire, etc), working in a kitchen (Jamie's Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, etc), working in a tattoo shop (Miami Ink, etc), driving on icy roads (Ice Road Truckers, etc), coping with teenage pregnancy and motherhood (16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, etc), buying and selling antiques (Bargain Hunt, etc), being affluent youngsters (Made in Chelsea, etc), going on dates (First Dates, The Undateables, etc), cleaning houses (How Clean Is Your House?, Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, etc), being poor (Benefits Britain, Benefits Street, Skint, etc), sharing a house (Big Brother), being in an airport and or on a plane (Airport, Airline, etc), buying and selling houses (Location, Location, Location, etc), being in hospital (24 Hours in A&E, etc), losing weight (The Biggest Loser, etc), or coping with medical problems (Embarrassing Bodies, etc). If that's all too exciting for us, we can instead watch people watching TV (Gogglebox).
I don't watch much TV; I don't have a TV license; I use DVDs, Netflix, 4OD, and BBC iPlayer if there's something I really want to watch. I had to use Wikipedia's lists of reality TV shows to research the above paragraph.
Back in the 70s, when Compton was writing The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, reality TV was only just appearing with a few experimental shows. These had a powerful effect on the popular imagination of the time, inspiring a range of SF writers, such as Compton.
In Katherine Mortenhoe's world, medical science has cured most illnesses, so most people die of old age or serious injuries (such as car crashes). Terminal illnesses are rare anomalies, and there's money to be made in filming rare anomalies and selling it to the public. Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal illness at the age of 44, giving her only 28 days to live, and must make tough choices about what to do with her remaining days, knowing that her privacy will be destroyed. It's quite a bleak book.
Compton writes well, and - to make a good point about the fake reality of reality TV - switches between third and first person narration: Katherine's story is narrated in the third person, telling us her actions but little of her thoughts; Roddie - 'The Man with the TV Eyes', a reporter with cameras in his eyes - narrates in the first person, giving his thoughts and his interpretation of Katherine's actions. Thus, Katherine's true character, her thoughts and goals, her inner life, are hidden from us: we have to figure it our for ourselves. The reader, like Roddie, like the viewers of reality TV, see only the external reality, missing out on all the inner complexity that makes people who they are. Our eyes may process the same images, but how we interpret them will differ.
'You see, beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They're not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye.'
The story is gripping and well-written. The premise is brilliantly bleak. The main characters are well-rounded and memorable. The anti-TV message is one I can get behind. It is a very good book.
However, the novel's world is rather shallow: there are brief mentions of Privacy Laws (relating to when and where reporters can film), fringies (people who live on benefits on the fringes of society), Computabooks (computer-generated books), and various political protest marches occurring, but it is not explored in depth. We are given no clues as to what country, or how far in the future, the story is set. Beyond the TV Eyes, advanced medical science, and Computabooks, there is little to no mention of technological progress. This all dates the novel: with those few exceptions, our dystopian present looks far more futuristic than Mortenhoe's world. Perhaps the list of reality TV shows above demonstrates that our dystopian present is also more terrifying than Mortenhoe's world...
But this is not a book about a dystopian society, and should not be read as such. It is, and succeeds as, a story about a woman coming to terms with her imminent death, and a man trying to understand her. Recommended
August 24, 2015
It surprises me that The continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is not more widely known. I've only recently found out about it (while browsing the shelves in a local bookstore, to boot), but the interesting blurb incited me to read it. Boy, am I glad I did. Now I totally understand why it's a part of the SF masterworks collection.
D.G. Compton had written this book in the advent of reality TV. He extrapolates that phenomenon to such lengths that may have been outrageous in the day, but alas, today it only shows how much foresight he had. The reality show Katherine Mortenhow is immersed in (basically by coercion) is only a step or two away from the usual fodder that is on the programme today. But what struck me the most is how underhandedly sinister this novel is. I saw that reflected in several elements:
1) The whole idea of the reality show. It's not surpising that people in charge of large TV networks crave high ratings, so they supply the programme which is most demanded. In a world where the vast majority of illnesses are eradicated, a terminally ill person becomes a spectacle, a circus sideshow. Everyone, from the press to the general populace, thinks that they have a right to intrude upon the person and their family. A clever TV executive can use that general pressure against the ill person to secure exclusive rights to film his/her dying.
2) The fact that .
3) Roddie. With the character of Roddie D.G. Compton propelled "eerie" off the charts. Roddie's choice to have cameras instead of eyes installed in him is not only creepy, but also a fantastic device the author used to further explore the themes of privacy, ethics and the cost of ambition.
4) The strange laws and mores in the society Katherine lives, which are never explicitly mentioned, but seethe under the surface. I love how the author chose to show those things, rather than state them, because even though the reader might not have a complete picture, it packs more of a punch to see "Three day grief" invoked, fixed marriage contracts and so on.
Katherine and Roddie, as the main characters, are well fleshed out and it's interesting to see how their journey (both physical and psychological) unfolds. However, I don't know who's sections made me more uncomfortable. The sense of being observed pervades Katherine's parts, while being in Roddie's head and knowing that the TV executives can see everything he sees all the time... was quite disturbing. And I think that's the point of this novel - to disturbe, but at the same time to make the reader think. If that's the point, then D.G. Compton succeeded.
D.G. Compton had written this book in the advent of reality TV. He extrapolates that phenomenon to such lengths that may have been outrageous in the day, but alas, today it only shows how much foresight he had. The reality show Katherine Mortenhow is immersed in (basically by coercion) is only a step or two away from the usual fodder that is on the programme today. But what struck me the most is how underhandedly sinister this novel is. I saw that reflected in several elements:
1) The whole idea of the reality show. It's not surpising that people in charge of large TV networks crave high ratings, so they supply the programme which is most demanded. In a world where the vast majority of illnesses are eradicated, a terminally ill person becomes a spectacle, a circus sideshow. Everyone, from the press to the general populace, thinks that they have a right to intrude upon the person and their family. A clever TV executive can use that general pressure against the ill person to secure exclusive rights to film his/her dying.
2) The fact that .
3) Roddie. With the character of Roddie D.G. Compton propelled "eerie" off the charts. Roddie's choice to have cameras instead of eyes installed in him is not only creepy, but also a fantastic device the author used to further explore the themes of privacy, ethics and the cost of ambition.
4) The strange laws and mores in the society Katherine lives, which are never explicitly mentioned, but seethe under the surface. I love how the author chose to show those things, rather than state them, because even though the reader might not have a complete picture, it packs more of a punch to see "Three day grief" invoked, fixed marriage contracts and so on.
Katherine and Roddie, as the main characters, are well fleshed out and it's interesting to see how their journey (both physical and psychological) unfolds. However, I don't know who's sections made me more uncomfortable. The sense of being observed pervades Katherine's parts, while being in Roddie's head and knowing that the TV executives can see everything he sees all the time... was quite disturbing. And I think that's the point of this novel - to disturbe, but at the same time to make the reader think. If that's the point, then D.G. Compton succeeded.
October 16, 2016
I bought this book because I am always looking for reliable reviews that will broaden my reading experience. The New York Review of books referred to it as "a thrilling psychological drama that is as wise about human nature as it is about the nature of technology". Well, sorry NYRB, but it is neither. It was published in the seventies and the technology aspect is anachronistic and irrelevant. And yet, it didn't have to be. Reading Orwell's "1984" published in the late 40s and Zamyatkin's "WE" published in the early 20s of the 20th century, there is no sense of anachronism even in this day and age. They are both still masterpieces notwithstanding the technology aspect and they both still captivate the reader. In "The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe" nothing works. The reading is flat, the characters uninteresting creating no empathy or antipathy, and the issue, because of the way it is handled, has not withstood the passing years as did other novels in this genre.
October 3, 2017
While it take a bit to get the pacing of the characters perspectives in each chapter, and it isn't made any easier by a character with TV eyes, this is an extremely innovative and forward thinking piece of speculative fiction. There's so many ideas in here it's a bit much, reality TV shows, and an ethical dilemma of euthanasia. Definitely fits next to Ballard and the other New Wave SF, but not exactly SF, which makes it oddly compelling.
February 13, 2025
Compton’s character work and prose really hit just right for me. The way he peppers in little subversions and parentheticals makes it feel more natural and modern to me. Not to mention the way that almost every bit of spec work has basically shaken out in real life. (beyond the basic premise of invasive reality TV, the computabook industry was decades ahead of the AI slop we’re dealing with in 2025)
August 30, 2014
A new take on making love to the camera. (Kind of.) (Not really.)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 161 reviews