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The Unsleeping Eye (1973)

by D.G. Compton(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

087997110X (ISBN13: 9780879971106)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

DAW

review 1: 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 t... morehat 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.
review 2: I came to this novel through its 1980 film adaptation, “Death Watch”. Both are rather meditative, which in our current express culture was a welcome change. This is perhaps one of the earliest novels (being published in 1974) to focus on the effects of reality television, as exemplified in the fascinating introduction by Lisa Tuttle. While I wouldn’t classify the story as cyberpunk, it does feature the cyber-motif of surgically altered eyesight (in this case, “video eyes”). That said, don’t expect to find the grittiness of a William Gibson novel here. Nevertheless, “The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe” (a far better title than its celluloid cousin) is well worth your time. less

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