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In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will - or will not - be. But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions - not nearly as certain as the machine he's appointed to serve. And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing . . .
The time: 1979 The place: a top-secret US Air Force base in the Cotswolds The actors: carefully selected, healthy-living personnel The missions: long-range reconnaissance flights The problem: is there any connection between these flights and the growing menace of a strange blood-cancer disease that is spreading through the world? Several of the more intelligent and intuitive realise that there is. There are those who retain their integrity, and doing so, lose their lives; and there are those who live silently in their knowledge, condemned to lives of emotional death.
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.
The Penheniot Experimental Research Village was a top-secret community with an elaborate defence system to keep away prying eyes. Inside the walls men rushed ahead with practical experiments to develop a means of time travel, while outside the everyday world fell victim to more and more plagues, strikes and rioting. The world was on the brink of chaos. Could the small band of scientists and chrononauts at Penheniot Village find a safe method of escape into the future before the violence and death outside destroyed them too?
On board an obsolete ship, nine weeks out from home, the latest batch of colonists arrive at their destination. A grim penal settlement in a wilderness worlds away from the homes they will never see again. TASMANIA? BOTANY BAY? No. For this is tomorrow, not yesterday. The dumping ground for social outcasts and political deportees is Mars, barren, unproductive, but invaluable as a convict settlement. What kind of welcome will the twenty-four deportees receive when the reception party from the Settlement reaches their stranded ship? And how will they survive in a primitive environment, an alien system?
It makes people positively ache with happiness. It puts the roses back in their cheeks and the itch back in their blood. "It" is the Scholes Virus - proper medical term for what used to be called, out of mawkish ignorance but with uncanny prescience, the "love bug". Professor Trevor Scholes has discovered, isolated and classified every variety of the infection that now bears his name. One variety, B79/K, is so rare that the odds are fifty thousand to one against two compatible carriers meeting. So of course Giles Cranston and Tamsin McGillivray meet . . .
If you want to know how, ask an expert - and here are the shared expertises and experience of some of the world's leading singing pedagogues as they explain their teaching methods across a wide range of topic areas working with CCM - Contemporary Commercial Music - Singers.
D.G. Compton is best known for his prescient 1974 novel, THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE, which predicted the 21st century's obsessions with media voyeurism and 'reality television'. It was filmed as DEATH WATCH in 1980 by Bertrand Tavernier. This omnibus collects three of his incisive SF novels, ASCENDANCIES, SYNTHAJOY and THE STEEL CROCODILE. ASCENDANCIES: Into a future where a depleted fuel supply had the world spiralling down into grinding poverty and constant war came ... Moondrift. Mysterious white flakes of alien matter that was the perfect fuel - clean, powerful, dependable. But the aliens - or whatever they were - who sent Moondrift seemed to demand a heavy ransom in return... SY...
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