The vidiotIb MelchiorOmniClassics · Literature
The vidiot
Ib MelchiorA television technician's accidental discovery raises a question larger than professional success.
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About the book
Don Hartley works on a live television space opera, where the demand for impossible-looking effects creates very practical difficulties in the control room. While experimenting with equipment, he discovers an effect that is no longer merely an illusion: a camera can see through intervening barriers. The prospect offers recognition, profit, and extraordinary new uses for television, all urgently attractive to a technician who resents being underestimated. Yet each imagined application carries another possibility, as the same power that reveals distant events could abolish the privacy of everyone observed. Melchior draws on the detailed routines of production to ground the speculative turn. The story follows the pressure of deciding what an inventor owes other people when a technical achievement gives him unprecedented access to their lives.
- Privacy and surveillance
- Invention and responsibility
- Ambition
Why read it
The studio setting makes the discovery tangible before the narrative opens its disturbing social implications.
English story from Fantastic Universe, March 1956