Today I’ve reviewed the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh story in my series on the science fictional media landscape of the future. In Kate Wilhelm’s masterpiece of blue-collar drama “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” (1976), reality TV serves both as domestic irritant and therapy. Langdon Jones, in “The Empathy Machine” (1965), also speculates on the therapeutic aspects of “viewing” the crisis of another in a media-drenched future.

As always, if you know of other stories connected to this series that I haven’t reviewed, then let me know in the comments!

Previously: Richard Matheson’s “Through Channels” (1951) and Robert F. Young’s “Audience Reaction” (1954)

Up Next: Henry Kuttner’s “Year Day” (1953)

5/5 (Masterpiece)

Kate Wilhelm’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” first appeared in Orbit 18, ed. Damon Knight (1976). You can read it online here if you have an Internet Archive account. I read it in her collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions (1979).

Lottie comes home from the factory Friday afternoon with “frozen dinners, bread, sandwich meats, beer” to prepare for the weekend watching reality TV with her husband Butcher (121). As predicted, Butcher comes home mad, “mad at his boss because the warehouse didn’t close down early, mad at traffic, mad at everything” (123). He pulls up his recliner–they’ll sleep in front of the softly flickering screens–Lottie microwaves the dinners and brings her husband beer. The ritual commences.

The show, This Is Your Crisis, plays every hour of the weekend in their house on a portable TV and their new expensive wall unit–required for the full experience. The premise? Survival in Alaska! Get to the extraction point first and win one million dollars, after taxes. The contestants? All dissatisfied folk driven to crime undergoing “Crisis Therapy that would enrich their lives beyond measure” (125). A special satellite and sensors relay their every move live without breaks or interruption in the feed. Lottie and Butcher sleep when they sleep. And when they wake up in the middle of the night, they listen to the calm voice of the night commentator, and watch the colored dots blink on the map, and watch the contestant campfires flicker safe in their own home.

The metaphor is simple. Lottie and Butcher, trapped in their lives, imagine they would win the show: “week after week it was the same. They forgot the little things and lost” (131). They project their own desires and insecurities onto the contestants. They are consumed by the show. Butcher doesn’t move from his recliner. They don’t change their clothes or bathe. Butcher screams at his wife when she tries to get him to clean up the beer cans. He responds violently when she gloats over the misfortunes of his chosen contestant. And when another contestant wins, she “slipped her arm about [Butcher’s] waist” and put aside the sad desperation of the weekend (135). The show is therapy for the viewers. And the next week, and the next, and the next.

While reading “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” it’s easy to forget that An American Family, the show credited with “birthing the reality TV genre,” only aired three years earlier in 1973. Two “precursor” reality TV-esque shows appeared before An American Family. Candid Camera, first a radio program that premiered in 1947, hit American televisions in 1948. And in late January 1965, The American Sportsman followed celebrity guests on hunting and fishing adventures. All of this is to say that Wilhelm’s survivalist reality TV, as with hyperviolent formulations in Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” (1958) and Walter F. Moudy’s “The Survivor” (1965), do not have clear predecessors. The first adventure “survivalist” take, Eco-Challenge, didn’t air until 1989! Consult this list for the eleven earliest reality TV shows.

I highly recommend “Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis” for fans of kitchen sink realism-style science fiction that explores how societal transformation impacts blue-collar lives. Wilhelm imagines an immersive viewing experience quite similar to multi-panel/camera Twitch livestreams. Beyond its ideas, the story is stark, rigorously structured, and adeptly told. Readers who might be put off by Wilhelm’s more oblique New Wave masterpieces–“The Planners” (1968), “The Encounter” (1970), and “Windsong” (1968) come to mind–might enjoy the minimalism of this one. Will be in my top 5 short story reads of the year and might even challenge “Baby, You Were Great” (1967) as my favorite Kate Wilhelm vision.

Reviews of Other Worthwhile Reality TV Short Stories

Brian W. Aldiss’ “Panel Game” (1955)

Robert Sheckley’s “The Prize of Peril” (1958)

Damon Knight’s  “You’re Another” (1960)

Walter F. Moudy’s “The Survivor” (1965)

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3/5 (Average)

Langdon Jones’ “The Empathy Machine” (1965) first appeared in Science Fantasy, ed. Kyril Bonfiglioli (January-February 1965). You can read it online here.

Langdon Jones (1942-2021) is a lesser known luminary of the New Wave movement. He contributed a spectacular sequence of stories between 1964 and 1972 and helped edit Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds. Jones also edited an influential anthology, The New SF: An Original Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction (1969), that I need to acquire. “The Empathy Machine” is a strange beast that is far from his best. Like Wilhelm’s tale, the story starts as a futuristic drama of a seemingly irreparable relationship in a puritanical, advertising-drenched, and overpopulated future. However, it quickly changes tack and morphs into an exotic exploration of the Martian landscape and secret Martian technology. The threads intertwine in a less than satisfying manner.

The first section creates a dystopian media landscape saturated by invasive advertising in even the most personal spaces. Henry Ronson’s bathroom mirror periodically shifts into commercials: “A softly seductive face filled the mirror. ‘Are you a–man?’ the girl whispered. She gave a soft little moue, which somehow gave the impression of strange hungers, and strange mixtures of desire and satiation. ‘Then you shave with Shavicream” (16). Ronson is something of a holdover from a previous era and detests their presence in his life and his wife’s enjoyment of them. He detests everything about his wife: her capacity for crying “often and easily” (18), her frigidity (27), her plumpness (26), her lack of fight, and speculates that she married him only for a larger apartment, and might conspiring to force him to commit suicide (23). He resolves to kill her on a vacation to Mars.

The second portion of the story follows their adventures on the Martian surface. They discover ruins in the sands. And a strange piece of technology that allows Ronson to “view” his wife… he is the reason for her suffering.

I found that the separate parts do not mesh effectively. The story contains too many threads and its best to not think to much about the illogical premise of the Martian portion of the story. Is Ronson’s cruelty directly caused by the media-saturated world? What elevates “The Empathy Machine” above more banal dystopias of this ilk is Jones’ ultimate argument that technology–in this instance, the mysterious Martian machine that allows Ronson to “see” Marian’s trauma—can be used to create the space for healing a relationship and empathy. This is a refreshing perspective. Regardless, I’m probably overrating this one. I am remined of John Brunner’s far superior “Fair” (1956).

For superior Langdon Jones works, check out my reviews of “I Remember, Anita…” (1964) and the collection The Eye of the Lens (1972).

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