The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe [Paperback]

A prescient 1970s sci-fi novel about death, celebrity, and the ubiquity of reality television, and the basis for the movieDeath Watch.

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’sNever Let Me Go, and the television seriesBlack Mirror,The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoeis a thrilling psychological drama that is as wise about human nature as it is about the nature of technology.“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—andThe Con­­­­tinuous Katherine Mortenhoeis 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

“Considering Katherine Mortenhoe was originally published in 1974, the book is eerily relevant in a world where we’ve surrendered so much of our personal information to tech giants like Facebook and Google. It also reads like l³Y