The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is one of those books: a 1974 near-future SF novel by the British writer D.G. Compton, published in the US as The Unsleeping Eye and filmed a few years later as Death Watch. It's set in the media landscape of the time, so some elements are old-fashioned - TV shows are broadcast at a particular time, and only seen in whole on big screens, for one major issue - but the depiction of a type of reality show, and how the public reacts to it, is true and prescient and starkly crisp. And its psychology, as Jeff VanderMeer notes in the introduction in the edition I read, is deep and nuanced and masterful.
Continuous has two main characters; I'll get to the title character second. Roddie is a reporter for the major outlet NTV in near-future Britain. He's recently had a major operation to install a TV camera in his eyes; we don't get the exact details, but it captures everything he sees and somehow transmits back to his company. He has additional tech for capturing sound; how exactly it works is not important. This is new technology, and a secret: NTV hopes to launch it in the world with a spectacular new series of some kind. Roddie is a rising star, and narrates his sections in first person.
Katherine is seen in third person. She's a middle-aged woman working in publishing - for Computabook, more-or-less creating complex AI prompts and then editing the output into a stream of romance novels that will be published under house names. This world has the usual '70s contract marriage with specific terms; her first marriage ended after the initial five-year term, and she's now remarried to Harold Clegg.
The time period is fuzzy: let's say two generations after it was written, but with no details of the geopolitical or even the UK-governance situation. Call it 2024 if you want; that's reasonable. It's not our 2024, because it never is in fiction. In this world, phones are still corded '70s tech and computers have somewhat enhanced capabilities but are still floor-filling '70s mainframes. But biotech has advanced much further, as we see with Roddie's eyes. In fact, it's advanced so far that it's vanishingly rare for anyone to die of any reason besides old age - diseases and syndromes and conditions can pretty much all be managed and cured, other than a tiny handful of exceptions. (Presumably, violent death, from accident or deliberate action, can't be guarded against in the same way, but Continuous isn't about that kind of death, so we don't learn the details.)
Katherine is called in to see Dr. Mason, her usual doctor. Behind a one-way glass are Roddie and his boss, Vincent Ferriman, a powerful producer at NTV. She's told that she has a terminal disease, that there is no possible cure. The details are a bit fuzzy as Compton tells it - a long list of symptoms he mostly glosses over, and an overall description that, frankly, read to this reader like bullshit. (Later in the novel, there's a reason for that - I won't explain further, but it does sound like bullshit, and that's on purpose.) She has perhaps four weeks to live, and might rapidly decline during that time.
Ferriman wants to give Katherine a contract; she'll make a small fortune by being the center of a "Human Destiny" TV show for as long as she lives. Roddie will film it; at some point they'll explain his eyes but maybe not at first. Ferriman intends to reach out to her later that day; he does contact her husband Harold before she even comes home from work for the day. He also - we infer from other things - leaks this story, with a garbled version of Katherine's name, which makes other media outlets start nosing around Katherine almost immediately. "Terminals" are media sensations: we don't get a good sense of how many there are, or how often, but they seem rare - one or two a year, perhaps, so surprising and novel and exciting every time.
Continuous is broken into eight sections, each named after a day, from Tuesday to Tuesday. We follow Roddie and Katherine, first separately and then eventually together, as they live through the media frenzy and navigate their changing lives. The world is fairly utopian, but we see mostly the underside of it - rapacious media packs, the "fringies" who have dropped out of normal life, protestors and youth gangs and sex cults.
Katherine doesn't want to sign with NTV - to sign with anyone, since it's basically a given (at least from the media companies) that she will sign an exclusive contract with someone to broadcast the details of her dying. She wants to stay private, not to be splashed all over the media. And her actions are mostly driven by trying to subvert that expectation, to get away from the camera eye and the public scrutiny, in a world where all of the forces push the opposite direction.
Roddie is more conflicted. He wants to make a great TV show, but he also wants to present "the true, continuous Katherine Mortenhoe" - to show her as she is, in context of her whole life, in a way she would recognize and agree with, and yet also be a big media splash in the way the audience wants. The reader might suspect Roddie can't possibly get what he wants, and might not like or trust him, particularly as he meets Katherine and doesn't tell her who is is or how his eyes work.
But, in the end, they do meet. Katherine does run away. It does all get televised. And it does end, for both of them, strongly and inevitably. Continuous is a novel about people, the kind of SF book where the technology is there to heighten the human drama, to make choices and options starker and crisper, and a book that does a great job of delineating those people, making them real and true, conflicted and contingent, specific and particular.
