The top 8 · archive
Every top 8 this site has run
A list that is not up today is not trimmed or summarised here - it is the list exactly as it was on show. The one on show now is at the top 8.
Part two · the top 8
Top 8 parasocial moments when the reply was manufactured
Every reply on this list was manufactured on the near side. The far end is where it arrived from, not where it came from.
Part one was cartoons, the version everyone agrees is harmless. This one is the machinery: the office that typed the reply, the card signed by a character, the meter that read the room, the tape that held the voice - and one entry where no reply ever came, from a girl who kept writing anyway. Ranked by how completely the reply was manufactured.
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11Nancy Drew1930–1984
What happens. For fifty-four years young readers wrote to a detective who did not exist, and letters came back. The replies came from the Stratemeyer Syndicate's correspondence department under the house name Carolyn Keene, which was a slot in a production system rather than a person. The New York Public Library holds the letters themselves - boxes 56 and 57 - including a few written by parents on behalf of their children, and by adults who had read the books as kids.
Why it is on the list. The reply was real, and it came from an office that had chosen not to have a face. Mildred Wirt Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 books and her identity was not made public until 1991, so almost every answer a child received arrived from a byline rather than a person. The tie as the reader lived it asked for nothing and was answered anyway - and the answering was manufactured, politely, for half a century.
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22Whiz Comics #21940
What happens. A reader sent in a code printed inside the comic they were holding and received a membership card, a certificate and a plastic Captain Marvel ring - issued under “the actual authority of Benj J. Grimm, Grand Marshal.”
Why it is on the list. The bond was assembled by the person who was attached. Nobody built a private channel; the near side performed the decoding out of materials the far side printed, and the reply was signed by a character so it would read as coming from inside the story.
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What happens. Tinker Bell drinks the poison meant for Peter, and he turns to the audience: “Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!” The published text carries the result as a stage direction - many clap, some do not, a few hiss, but Tink is saved.
Why it is on the list. The one place on the list where the reply is scripted into the work itself - and manufactured in advance, in case the real one did not arrive: members of the orchestra were stationed to clap if the public declined, which a Smithsonian centenary account calls “an unnecessary precaution”. The far end is a fairy who has just been poisoned. The audience is asked to save a life out loud, and every night it does.
ON THE SHELF
The Binding of Margery KempeMedieval binding as performance of self. EGSA 2011. Free to read.
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44Queen for a Day1945
The applause meter was pointed at the wrong room
Queen for a Day, 1945
LAW 3 · Someone holds the dreamWhat happens. A contestant told her troubles and a box on the studio wall registered the reaction by needle. The millions listening at home could not applaud into it.
Why it is on the list. The instrument that decided somebody’s life was measuring a different and much smaller audience than the one listening - so the verdict on her misfortune came from a room she could see.
ON THE SHELF
Company DreamerThe #1 dreamer in the world has her life rearranged to keep her end-dream in the black.
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What happens. A girl in hiding wrote for two years to a listener who does not exist, and told him so: “I hope the feeling is mutual.”
Why it is on the list. The whole condition named from the inside, fourteen years before anybody had a phrase for it. She is not deceived - she knows Kitty is invented - and she writes anyway, and states in one clause what she wants from a relationship that cannot return it. The hoping, not the letter, is the subject.
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What happens. A dentist denied for five years that he was the farmer in the painting. His sister said the picture “made a personality out of me.” His brother ended the sittings by telling her so.
Why it is on the list. A real person refusing a one-sided relationship with a painted version of himself - and the refusal, not the fame, is what the picture is remembered for.
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77Krapp's Last Tape1958
Talking to the tape of himself at thirty-nine
Krapp's Last Tape, 1958
LAW 4 · Grief is real when the companion changesWhat happens. On his sixty-ninth birthday a man loads the reel he recorded at thirty-nine and talks to it. The tape is missing four words, in every edition.
Why it is on the list. Everywhere else on this site the far end is somebody else. Here it is a recording of the near side, and it cannot answer either - and it is not even a faithful copy of the past.
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88The parrot1920
What happens. A bird produces fluent speech addressed to you - your name, in the right tone - with no comprehension behind it. The mimicry is accurate; there is no listener. People talk to it as though there were.
Why it is on the list. The control case for the whole list: the far end is alive and still not there. People stop talking once they work out what is happening, and what they were attached to turns out to have been the imitation rather than the animal. The reply was manufactured so completely that understanding it ends it.
ON THE SHELF
Company DreamerThe #1 dreamer in the world has her life rearranged to keep her end-dream in the black.
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