The winner and new...

About the book

An exuberant host welcomes a vast audience to the weekly Quizz, interrupting the excitement only for a polished advertisement promising bodily improvement. The reigning contestant specializes in postage stamps; his new challenger selects the planet Mars. A computer supplies increasingly difficult questions while force-fields isolate the participants from outside assistance. The apparatus appears designed to ensure fairness, yet the ceremony's intensity suggests that more is at stake than an entertaining display of memory. Melchior builds the short satire from recognizable habits of broadcasting: rehearsed spontaneity, commercial intimacy, applause, and the cultivation of suspense. The contrast between the contestants' narrow fields of knowledge and the extravagant importance assigned to their performance gives the contest its uneasy comic force without disclosing its final implication in advance.

• Mass entertainment
• Knowledge and competition
• Commercial spectacle

Why read it

The familiar rhythms of quiz-show television make the speculative setting feel plausible before its implications become clear.

English short story