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THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE

D.G. Compton

Katherine Mortenhoe lives in a near future very similar to the present day. Only in her time, dying from anything but old age is unheard of; death has been cured. So when Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal brain disease brought on by an inability to process an ever increasing volume of sensory input, she immediately becomes a celebrity to the “pain-starved public.” But Katherine rejects her tragic role: She will not agree to be the star of a Human Destiny TV show, her last days will not be documented or broadcast. What she doesn't realize is that from the moment of diagnosis she's been watched, not only by television producers but by a new kind of program host, a man with a camera behind his unsleeping eyes.

Like Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and the television series Black Mirror, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is a thrilling psychological drama that is as wise about human nature as it is about the nature of technology.

David Guy Compton was born in London in 1930. After a stint in the theatre world, he had, at twenty-two years old, a baby daughter with the wife of the director and was unsurprisingly jobless. The sixty-four years since then have been classic writer's biography material: various unsuitable employments — postman, window dresser, bank guard, dockyard worker. Compton's first sales were of radio plays for the BBC and in translation abroad. He also got editorial work, particularly for Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Short stories and then novels followed, most significantly in a genre that—being no scientist—he likes to call speculative fiction.In the years that followed a dozen or so well-received novels appeared.His 1974 novel, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe was filmed as Death Watch by the French director Bertrand Tavernier in 1980. Compton now lives in the United States.
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Published 2016-07-01 by New York Review Books

Comments

Like his peers Philip K. Dick, Bernard Wolfe, and J.G. Ballard, D.G. Compton had a special capacity for sensing the encroachment of what has in fact become our present life. And, as with those writers at their best—and The Con­­­­tinuous Katherine Mortenhoe is Compton at his best —he found a way to embody his apprehensions with a sympathy and fascination and horror that puts the reader inside the skin of his characters, and inside the skin of the world. — Jonathan Lethem

'a masterpiece' (Jeff Vandermeer in The Atlantic) Read more...