TY  - BOOK
AU  - Melchior,Ib
AU  - Moritz,Edward
TI  - The winner and new..
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2026///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Science fiction
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Television game shows -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2026-02-28; Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Luminist Archive); Originally published; New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1956
N2  - The winner and new... by Ib Melchior is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It satirizes mass media, consumerism, and politics through a high-stakes television quiz show where knowledge becomes spectacle and the ultimate prize is national power.

A flamboyant emcee hosts a colossal live quiz in a stadium and before a vast TV audience, complete with glamorous ads and a computer that selects questions. The long-reigning champion, a timid philatelist named Monroe, faces a confident challenger, James Burton, who chooses Mars as his category. Sealed in force-fields to prevent any outside help, they trade increasingly difficult questions—ranging from Martian geography and biology to obscure stamp lore—while the tension mounts. After hours, Monroe finally misses a deceptively simple stamp question, his force-field implodes, and he vanishes; the emcee then proclaims Burton “the Winner and New President of the United States,” revealing the show’s chilling premise and the story’s sharp critique of entertainment-driven governance. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/FU/FU_1956_07.pdf
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78073
ER  -