Radio: Kaleidoscope (Dimension X)

As I observed in our last Bradbury episode, "Marionettes, Inc.," Bradbury is a master of the short-story form.  He can pack an awful lot into a small number of words.  That one, I estimated at about 2,500 words.  "Kaleidoscope," I'd guess, is about 3,000.  Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I have written you a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one."  Well, when it comes to his fiction, Bradbury finds the time.  Often, the shorter his stories, the more there seems to be in them.  So you'd think these two short stories might be similar tasks as far as radio adaptation goes.  But not so much.

"Marionettes, Inc." has so much idea and implied backstory in it, despite its brevity, that it unwinds itself in our imaginations like a released high-tension spring.  One could argue that part of the greatness of Bradbury as a short story writer is not just that he can write a story that almost elaborates on itself, but that, having done it, he knows when to stop, and doesn't elaborate on it himself.  It shows his dedication as a writer that he was willing to do this in a field where way too much fiction, even by good writers, looked like it was spun out with intense consciousness of the fact that each extra word was an extra penny or two in their pocket.  Fortunately for Bradbury, that kind of dedication to his craft eventually saw his words earning him considerably larger sums in the slicks.

When you're a radio scriptwriter, however, and you need to tell stories in complete scenes with dialogue-- moreover, enough to fill half an hour --it's time to elaborate.  And as I noted before, George Lefferts did a great job of it with "Marionettes, Inc."

But "Kaleidoscope," despite its similarity of scale, is a different sort of beast.  It's not compressed so much as it's polished, every unnecessary detail ground away to reveal a gleaming gem.

You see, "Kaleidoscope" is one of the best and earliest existential science fiction stories.  Yes, I know I'm sounding again like I'm applying for a professorship.  But think about it.  People are propelled to their inevitable doom, their destination beyond their control.  All they have left, essentially, is how they choose, or are able, to react to the consciousness of their own mortality.  They can dwell on the past.  They can get what bitter satisfaction they can by making others miserable.  They can treat it as an adventure.  Bradbury took what could just have been a story about astronauts flung from an exploded spaceship, and gave it universality, made it into a metaphor for the human condition.

That great philosopher, James Tiberius Kirk, once said that "How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life."  An existentialist would tell him that the two are synonymous.  Consciousness of "life" as a condition requires consciousness of our own mortality.  Really dealing with life is what you do with it, despite the sure knowledge that, as far as you're concerned, it's all going to come to nothing.

Me, I run like hell in the other direction and try to distract myself, so I probably wouldn't make a good existentialist.



The problem with adapting something like "Kaleidoscope" is that adding detail is a bit like gluing the marble chips back onto a Michaelangelo statue.  It's bigger, from a certain point of view it's more complete, but the message gets lost in the medium.

The story opens with the ship exploding.  By the second paragraph, the characters are floating to their doom.  Here, we get several minutes of the why and how, background about their mission, backstory about the characters.  We learn about the need to get to Venus ahead of the "Asiatics."  Later on, the episode pretty much becomes about the specific regrets of Captain Hollis, about his worldview, about how he's been a bad husband and father.

Considering the lack of conventional action in the original story, though, it's interesting that Lefferts chooses to exclude the most obvious: Hollis getting his extremities shorn away by small, fast meteoroids, "death in space... cut[ting him] away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher."  Perhaps it seemed a bit grotesque for network radio.  Maybe, considering Hollis's detachment, a dramatization threatened to become unintentionally comic-- "Whoops, there goes my foot."

Maybe the biggest misstep is mentioning, several times, the possibility of rescue.  The story works as a metaphor because the characters are completely helpless in the face of inevitable demise.  Remove that helplessness, and it's lost the universality of Bradbury's story, and the starkness of its metaphor.  It's a story about guys in space, and whether or not they'll survive.  Half an hour of radio drama.

It's not bad as that, though.  It may be a little on the nose, but I liked this exchange between Hollis and his wife, regarding their son:

"I don't want him to be soft."
"What is it, Louis? What is there about being soft that you despise?"
"Sissies are soft."
"Christ was soft."

And arguably, Lefferts makes one improvement.  In the story, it's an unspecified woman and child who witness the meteor-like streak of what only we know is Hollis burning up in the atmosphere.  Lefferts makes it Hollis's own wife and son.  You could argue that it loses the point of Bradbury's ending, which is that for all our own individual condition of life, death, and oblivion, we do have an effect on others, even if they don't know us.  But I don't know if it quite works in the story, and although Lefferts' ending doesn't have metaphorical weight, at least it's emotionally affecting.  Interestingly, Bradbury himself did something similar in an earlier story for Thrilling Wonder, "Promotion to Satellite," with an astronaut's family seeing the celestial phenomenon he's become in death.

A few miscellaneous notes:

* I got goosebumps when Hollis was entering the atmosphere.  A highly effective and spooky use of music and sound effects.

* "Since there's no friction, we'll all pick up speed."  Sir Isaac Newton is spinning in his grave.

* "[A] meteor swarm-- some little asteroids." At first, I thought this was incorrect usage of the word "asteroid," but Wikipedia notes that although today, the word refers almost exclusively to the minor planets of the inner solar system, it has "historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not show the disk of a planet and was not observed to have the characteristics of an active comet." The word "meteor," however, is incorrect. What he's looking at are meteoroids. "A meteor is the visible path of a meteoroid that has entered the Earth's atmosphere." Huh. You learn something new every day.

* I know I'm being over-literal, considering this is metaphor, but in both story and episode, I find it a little tough to accept that men starting from the same place, and propelled by an explosion small enough not to kill them, could possibly be headed for such diverse locations as the Earth, the Sun, a group of meteoroids, etc.

Radio: First Contact (Dimension X)

This story marked something of a milestone in the treatment of aliens, and human interaction therewith. Typically in science fiction, intelligent alien races tended to fall into a few categories: older but decadent races (most typical of stories about Mars); younger and savage races (frequently seen on Venus); and slavering, rapacious monsters, come to conquer us (from just about everywhere else). In "First Contact," however, Leinster shows us an alien race just as sophisticated and reasonable as we are, with similar goals. Humans and aliens meet while both are engaged in peaceful exploration. They can't be sure of each other, but they can understand each other. They're even similar enough that, in the story, the aliens laugh at our dirty jokes. Moral: people are the same all over, even if they're aliens.

I can't help thinking that this has something to do with the specific period it comes from. "First Contact" originally appeared in the May 1945 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. World War II was about to end in Europe. Although the Soviet Union had been thought by many through the 1920's and 30's to be utterly inimical to the West, they had been the unlikely allies of the United States for several years. If there was any period that was right for the feeling that two peoples, no matter how alien to each other, could reach an understanding, this might have been it: when the Axis was all but beaten, and the Cold War had yet to begin. It was the same window of hope that gave birth to the United Nations.

Where I'm going with this is that if this is the point of the story, it helps to excuse the major failing of the story, which is that the aliens just aren't very... alien. In 1934, Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" appeared in Wonder Stories. It featured the memorably alien Tweel. He and a human learned to communicate, after a fashion, and work together. However, the human never did figure out some quirks of alien thinking, such as how the same object, including Tweel himself, could have a bewildering variety of different names at unpredictable times. By comparison, Leinster's aliens in this story might as well be from around the block... or, you know, from around the world.

Sorry about the occasional annoying popping. I tried out an anti-popping filter on it, but it didn't work.



Here's where I get to the spoileriffic stuff. "First Contact" is a classic story, and I enjoy it a lot, but frankly, I've never quite understood the logic of the ending. The story has the same standoff as the radio script, and for the same reason, but has a very different resolution: the two crews agree to destroy all records and disable all sensors that will allow either ship to follow the other, or find its home base. Then, to make sure neither crew cheats, they exchange ships. The two crews split up and go home.

Now, that makes some sense, in isolation. The problem is that, earlier in the story, Leinster emphasized how unlikely it would be for two spacefaring races to be contemporaries, technologically speaking. One would almost inevitably be far in advance of the other. So how is exchanging ships an answer? Isn't one race giving the other a golden opportunity to catch up? Granted, they don't seem to know yet, when they switch ships, which race is the more advanced, but should either be willing to take the chance?

Script writer Howard Rodman could have avoided this problem by changing either the situation or the solution. As it happened, he did both: the crews keep their own ships, and he never gives us a reason to think them anything but technological equals. Interestingly, he also makes the ending rather inconclusive, with the humans worried they've been had, and uncertain if it's safe to go home. This is quite a change from Leinster's ending, which cleanly cuts the story's Gordian knot. It's surprising to find a Dimension X adaptation with a more complex ending than the published story. Perhaps again, it was the zeitgeist of the real world creeping in: in 1951, reaching understanding with an "alien race" didn't seem quite so simple, trust quite so easy, the future quite so bright, as it had six years earlier.

Radio: Marionettes, Inc. (Dimension X)

As we've seen, Astounding Science Fiction, sponsor of Dimension X, made its presence felt not just in providing the source material for some episodes out of its back issues, but also by having the occasional story adapted directly out of the issue then on the newsstand.

I wonder how much influence John W. Campbell, or anyone else at Street and Smith, had on the series' story selection otherwise. How did he/they feel when Dimension X adapted a story out of the competition? "Marionettes, Inc.," for instance, was from Startling Stories, a sister publication to Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Here's the cover from that, from my collection, by the way:

A previous owner took it on himself neatly to trim the ragged pulp edges, so that now the cover advertises that Hall of Fame Class by Clifford D. Sima, "The Loo of Tim."  That's one you won't ever be hearing on Dimension X.

Getting back on topic, I suppose having an adaptation out of Startling wasn't too bad for Campbell and Astounding, considering Dimension X didn't announce where a story was originally published unless it was one of those "ripped from the pages of Astounding" episodes. Many listeners might even assume automatically that all of the stories on the series were examples of what Astounding Science Fiction had to offer. In which case, "Bring on the best from the competition!" Campbell might think.

And this is definitely a good one. I'd heard at least one radio version and watched the Ray Bradbury Theater television episode of "Marionettes, Inc." before I read the story. Those half-hour adaptations work well, and the idea could easily extend even further. So I was surprised by how short the original is. The text covers a little under three and a third pages in its original magazine appearance. I think that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 words. I mean, Ray Bradbury is a master of the short-story form, but wow, that's packing a lot into a small space.

Scriptwriter George Lefferts does an excellent job expanding the story, shuffling around Bradbury's incidents and dialogue and interpolating his own seamlessly. Well, almost; the confrontation in the shop is maybe a little over the top. But for the most part, you wouldn't know what lines came from whom unless you were searching through the story while listening to it... as I was, writing this. (And my favorite line--Smith describing Mrs. Braling as "that female meat-grinder"--is original to Lefferts.)

"By the year 1990, we should see many amazing technological advances. And yet, in many ways, life will be very much the same." This is how the radio version opens. The episode inadvertently teaches a lesson in the perils of telling stories set in the not-too-distant future. (As does the story, in which the "1990 model" is also the current one. Although if Marionettes, Inc., is anything like car manufacturers in our time, it could be early in 1989.) I'm not just talking about how there are robotic duplicates realistic enough to fool the human original's loved ones. I'm talking about how it pretty much goes without saying that a working man's spouse is a housewife.



*Slight toning down for the radio audience of 1951: in the episode, the future Mrs. Braling "threatened to tear off her clothing and call the police" unless Braling married her. In the story, "she tore her clothes and rumpled her hair and threatened to call the police" unless he married her.

*Deflation? In the episode, there are two models, costing $7,500 and $9,000. In the story, they range from $7,600 to $15,000. And even that seems in retrospect like an enormous bargain for 1990. I spent more than that on a used Ford Bronco II in 1989. (Although, granted, that turned out to be a terrible bargain.)

Next time: "First Contact." No, not the Star Trek one with the Borg. No, not the other one, either. It has nothing to do with Star Trek. Just get Star Trek right out of your mind. Got it? Good. So join us in nine days as we pick up the sixtieth anniversary of Dimension X in its new timeslot with Murray Leinster's classic tale of, uh, a starship boldly going where no man has gone before.

Radio: Untitled Story (Dimension X)

"What's with that title, or lack thereof?" you may ask. And well you might. But first, this:

Pretty much the first thing I do every week is to check the Contento list of science fiction anthologies, so I can find out where the adapted story appears, and where it was first published. That's so I can get out the right book or magazine if I have it, or order one if I don't. That was how I knew to order a copy of No Time Like the Future to read "Vital Factor" for last week's installment.

This week, I couldn't find an entry... meaning that, at least up through 1983 (I didn't check the various updates), no anthologists had included it in their collections. Not one. I guessed that, like "Courtesy," the producers of Dimension X adapted "Untitled Story" right out of the contemporary issue of Astounding (which, since the cover date is when a magazine goes off the newsstand, was September 1951), which I had. (I wouldn't have had to guess, it turned out, had I listened to the radio version first, but I take my victories where I can get them.)

Which leaves the question of why it isn't in any anthologies. And I submit that the reason is... well, that it isn't very good. I like to be positive here, so it kind of disturbs me that I haven't liked the last two stories. But I did commit to talk about the stories and their adaptations, so I sort of have to say what I think. And I can at least say that the radio episode, as I guessed after reading the story that it would, that it solves the story's main problem.

That's that it's told in a half-paced manner. At a rough estimate, the story is 16,000 words long. That would take about 96 minutes to read aloud. There is some extra plot in the story, but not as much as that, and none of it is necessary. However, that takes us into spoiler territory, so I'll resume after the player window.



In the story, Hayssen and Cathy don't confront Lehman in Cathy's office. Instead, they chase Lehman and his time machine into the primeval past, where he and Hayssen duke it out amidst the lava. Lehman dies, and Hayssen is grievously injured, but Cathy saves him by turning him into Darth Vader applying future medicine. Fortunately for the radio audience, scriptwriter George Lefferts realized that once we're caught up on what's been happening all this time and why, the story is essentially over, and we're ready for the wrap-up.

There's also a section in the middle where Hayssen slowly realizes he's been drugged by Lehman, although I can't figure out for the life of me what significance that plot thread serves. Evidently, neither could Lefferts. There are a couple additional attempts to kill Hayssen. Believe me, in this case less is more.

Lefferts made some additional, lesser alterations. He had the Mayor pay $50,000 for the potion (which seems to me beyond the price range of even a corrupt mayor in the 1950's), rather than Robinson's $1,000 (which seems absurdly low for something supposed to save his life). He adds the bit about the pin to get the information about the office into the plot quicker.

Oddly, it's the very question of the office that's the one plot thread Lefferts drops in the compression. When Hayssen was there the first time, it was actually Lehman's time machine, sitting inside the empty room. You see, the time machines can dematerialize in one location and re-materialize in another, like the TARDIS. And Lehman deliberately chose an office of the same dimensions as his time machine. By the time Hayssen came back, Lehman and the machine were gone, leaving the empty room.

Lefferts also compresses the matter of Hayssen's death and resurrection, and doesn't do a particularly believable job of it. He makes it look like all you have to do to bring a dead person back is to carry their body back in time to before they died.

In Robinson's story, it's somewhat more complex. A time traveler goes back alone to before the person died, and picks the person up. He then goes further back before going forward again along the "original" time track, so that the intervention never happened, and the person died as per "normal." The alternative-timeline version now replaces the dead "original" version.  Cathy uses this to resurrect Jock, the dog-- and explains to Hayssen that Lehman has already brought Hayssen himself back this way, although, of course, Hayssen doesn't (and can't) remember this death, since it didn't happen to "him," per se.

So far, so good.  But Robinson is inconsistent about how time travel works. Basically, there are two theoretical flavors of time travel: infinitely-branching parallel universes (where you can kill your grandfather but continue to exist because you're just in a different timeline now, and your "home" timeline, where you were born, still exists), and single-timeline (in which any trips you make were "always" part of that one timeline, and you therefore can't change history). The method of resurrection is of the former type.

However, later in the story, we find there seems to be one future, and when a change in the timeline negates the existence of someone in that future, they (ludicrously) disappear, yet everyone knows they "used" to exist but no longer do. It's like the disappearing siblings in Marty's photo in Back to the Future, only sillier. (As it happens, that movie has its time travel both ways, too, with both a grandfather paradox and an alternative 1985. Don't even get me started about the second one, where Doc and Marty somehow go direct from 2015 to a dystopic 1985 that is not the past of that 2015. Now, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah.)

By the way, in Robinson's ending, Hayssen drinks the potion. All people from the future use it, and he needs it so that he and Cathy will age at the same rate. And despite its length, Cathy falls in love with Hayssen as easily and unbelievably there, too.

Frankly, I'm surprised John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, bought this story. It's kind of a mess on its own account, but especially so if you put it next to Astounding's definitive time-travel story, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," which pursued the consequences of time travel in a one-timeline system in typically rigorous Heinlein fashion.

For what it's worth, Robinson was surprised, too. According to him, he wrote it for the less-discriminating Amazing Stories, but his agent, Frederik Pohl, decided to try Astounding first. Fortunately for them, Campbell had a hole to fill. Which brings us back (finally) to that title, or non-title. Robinson called it "Untitled Story" because he knew Amazing frequently made up their own titles. But Campbell didn't have that habit, so when he bought the story, it kept the title it, well, didn't have.  So it's not pretentious, it's just an accident.

Radio: Vital Factor (Dimension X)

Here we have another adaptation of an extremely recent story, this time from the August 1951 issue of Esquire, which had probably left the newsstands a couple of weeks earlier.  I thought at first that Street & Smith, the sponsor of Dimension X, might be advertising one of their other magazines, the way they adapted "Courtesy" right out of the current Astounding Science Fiction.  But, looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems that Esquire was unrelated.  I guess the producers of Dimension X just read the story in the magazine, and quickly moved to get the rights to adapt it.

What follows may be considered spoilers, although I've tried hard not to reveal the details of the surprise ending.

I first encountered this story a few months ago via a DVD of its television adaptation on ABC's Tales of Tomorrow, which was broadcast only 71 days after NBC's radio adaptation here.  I knew nothing about it ahead of time, and it quickly seemed to me that I was watching sort of a loose adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon."

In case you haven't read it, "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is about a millionaire capitalist/industrialist who is determined to develop a Moon rocket.  Although he speaks of great riches to be made on the Moon, he knows it's mostly just an excuse, and he may bankrupt his company and himself trying to achieve his boyhood dream of being the first man on the Moon.  Keep this in mind as you listen.

Then came that twist ending, which was like nothing in Heinlein's story, and the end credit, stating it was based on a story by Nelson Bond.  I was amazed, but some time spent on Google left me none the wiser.

Last week, I listened to this radio version, and I suddenly wondered if "Vital Factor" was meant to be a satire on "The Man Who Sold the Moon," and possibly on Heinlein heroes in general.  The episode seems to take the least likable characteristics of Heinlein's D.D. Harriman, and turn them up to eleven in Wayne Crowder: he's high-handed, incredibly touchy, won't take "no" for an answer, and, well, is kind of an ass.  It takes Crowder up to the brink of victory, then slaps him upside the head with his comeuppance.  It's as though the episode were deliberately inverting Heinlein's message that money and determination, in sufficient quantity, can move science and change the world.  Here, it turns out that Crowder also requires help that money, in itself, can't buy-- and that it turns his dream into a nightmare.

I Googled the story again (now that I had its proper title), and again, no mentions of the similarities between Bond's story and Heinlein's.  So, still confused, I ordered a copy of the 1954 collection No Time Like the Future, which contains the actual story.  And while waiting for it, I re-read "The Man Who Sold the Moon."  I didn't like the character of Harriman any more than I did the first time, but it struck me that that may be the point: that the people with the power to make history aren't necessarily admirable on a personal level.  And even in Heinlein's story, the protagonist doesn't get the main thing he wants.  He gets his rocket, but he doesn't get to ride on it.  The story explicitly likens him to Moses, leading his people up to the Promised Land, but himself barred from entering.

When No Time Like the Future arrived, I quickly read Bond's story.  And you know what?  I'm still confused.  The story runs only seven pages in the book, and so Bond didn't have time (and/or maybe the inclination) to make Crowder one-tenth the jerk that radio scriptwriter Howard Rodman did.  But I don't think we're supposed to like him in the story, either.  In the end, it becomes something of a shaggy dog story.  Did you hear the one about the millionaire who was desperate to get into space?  Well, he did, and how.


The radio version keeps Bond's ending, with the explanation that the "vital factor" all of Crowder's money and determination couldn't buy was sentiment.  But it sounds a false note to me in both versions.  What was Crowder's Folly born of if not sentiment?  He may talk of the money to be made, of the power he'll have, of how he's a logical man, but what makes him so hell-bent on making the trip himself?  Like Harriman, pure sentiment.  Also Bond doesn't do himself any favors by telling a story set in a realistic barely-future world of businessmen and balance sheets, and then dropping that twist on us out of left field.  It ends up seeming even sillier than it had to.

I just re-watched the television version, and it wisely drops the whole issue of sentiment.  But out of the three, I think my favorite is the radio, because it has a definite point, setting Crowder up for a fall, and making him a character we can't wait to see (or hear) take that fall.

So I end the whole process almost as confused as before.  I think Bond was trying to make a point, but missed it.  I still don't know if he was aware of "The Man Who Sold the Moon," which was first published a year earlier.  But I'm most puzzled that no one-- like, say, Heinlein --seems ever to have made an issue over "Vital Factor" seeming something like a Reader's Digest condensed version with a new and inferior ending.  But at least all three (put together!) didn't make me spend as much time with their unlikable hero as Heinlein did.

Radio: The Veldt (Dimension X)

Our celebration of what's left of the sixtieth anniversary of the classic NBC radio series Dimension X continues with Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt."

I once posted on this blog the version produced nearly four years later for X Minus One, but don't bother to find it, because both the file and the player went offline long ago, and I haven't gotten around to fixing that yet.  And all I said there that's worth repeating now is:

Yes, it's virtual reality, imagined about forty years before "virtual reality." (I just checked Wikipedia to make sure I had the time right, and found this: "An early short science fiction story--'The Veldt'--about an all too real 'virtual reality' was included in the 1951 book The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury and may be the first fictional work to fully describe the concept.")

(Although, checking the link now, I see that that quote is no longer part of their article on virtual reality.  Oh, well.)


Star Trek: The Next Generation's holodeck is also somewhat reminiscent of this story's nursery.  In theory, the reason in Trek why the user can seem to be in a large environment in a not-too-large room is that there are holographic images on the walls, floor, and ceiling, as in the nursery here.  Where TNG did "The Veldt" one better, of course, was in creating closer objects with force fields, so the user can interact with them.  In "The Veldt"... well, I'm not sure what happens, but it's not part of the factory specs.

I suppose this makes "The Veldt" the first "holodeck accident" story, 37 years before TNG (or even 24 years before a startlingly forward-looking animated Trek episode called "The Practical Joker").  But don't hold that against it.

I wish I could say more about the original story, but, er, I haven't read it.  I ordered a collection including it, but it didn't make it here for the anniversary.  Imagine how I feldt.  (Sorry, I had to get a "dt" joke in here somewhere.  If I do any more, you may want to get out the beldt, and raise some weldts on my peldt.)

As last week, this recording has some apparent crosstalk from another station, but it's not as bad.



A line about the futuristic house that's become pretty funny in the interim: "The soundproofed Happy Life home had cost $30,000, installed."

I'm guessing children Peter and Wendy were named after the characters in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.  (Incidentally, I find, Googling the issue, that Barrie did not, as many people claim, invent the name "Wendy."  Isn't the Internet wonderful?)

I can't help imagining this house as the same one in "There Will Come Soft Rains," earlier in its life.  (Although as I recall, that one was custom-designed, whereas this one seems to be off the shelf.)

Note that the producers seem to have accidentally left the nursery "echo" filter on for the announcer's throw to the title.

This adaptation is far superior to the later X Minus One version.  That one had a narrative envelope which allowed Ernest Kinoy (who scripted both versions) to use Ray Bradbury's descriptions in dialogue as the characters recount the events, rather than via a narrator, as here.  Unfortunately, it seriously blunted the impact of the story, literalizing and softening Bradbury's unexplained ending into some psychological episode and promising that the characters will eventually be all better.

Radio: Courtesy & Universe (Dimension X)

You may remember, eighteen months or so ago, I was teasing something coming up on what was then Friday Radio.  Well, here it is (with the logo I designed at the time):

NBC Radio's classic science fiction anthology, Dimension X premiered April 8, 1950.  For the sixtieth anniversary, I was hoping not just to present all 46 episodes, but perhaps release an anthology of stories used in the series, and maybe interview Ernest Kinoy, who wrote about half the scripts.

Well, I never got around to it.

Then, last week, after referring to Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," and the radio adaptations thereof, I was going to post the versions from Dimension X and the later, longer-running X Minus One.  I checked the episode list on Wikipedia, and found that Dimension X ran longer than I'd remembered: all the way until October 29, 1951.  We've still got about three months of the sixtieth anniversary to go.

So, every week, I'll present the episode that aired that week, and maybe an extra... like this week.  And I'll write a little about the original story and the adaptation.  There are some spoilers for the original stories, so watch out.

First, "Universe," based on the story by Robert A. Heinlein, re-broadcast sixty years ago today, August 2, 1951.

The more stories I read, the more I'm getting to think that the early '40s were Heinlein's best period-- vibrant with new ideas tempered with rationality, and without so much of the general cynicism about humanity that seemed to color his work later on.  This is the period of his primal causal-loop story "By His Own Bootstraps," his consideration in "Blowups Happen" of the possible dangers of nuclear power, and "Solution Unsatisfactory," in which, before the United States had even entered World War II in real life, he pictured our defeating Germany with a uranium-based weapon (although it's what we would now call a "dirty bomb" rather than an atom bomb), and went on to consider the political consequences of the possession of such a dangerous weapon.

In "Universe," Heinlein originates an idea so good that, in many other, later hands, it became something of a cliché: the generational mission on which the descendants have forgotten that they're on a spaceship,  and that they're headed somewhere.  The storytelling is still exciting-- crisp, fast, believable, and ground-level --and must have been more so for readers who'd had to slog through the florid, slow, detached prose style that dominated the '20s and '30s.

I like that both points of view on Jordan and the Journey-- what could be called the spiritual and the materialistic --are each right and wrong in different ways.  The former believes the surviving science and history which suggest a wider world beyond the Ship are purely metaphorical; the latter accepts the science on face value, but dismisses Jordan and the Journey as legend.  Similarly, the mutants are neither heroes nor villains, but people with different abilities and characters: catalysts in Hugh's growth.

The only downside to the story is that, having set a goal-- the re-education of the populace to the truth about the Ship --it abruptly slams to a close well short of there.  I know Heinlein wrote a sequel (although I haven't read it yet), but this is less like setting up a sequel than it is like reaching the end of an installment of a serial.

The radio adaptation has its good and bad points.  For some reason, scriptwriter George Lefferts changed the mutation of the "mutie" leader.  (No, Marvel's X-Men did not introduce that pejorative.)  Here, it's something unspecified wrong with his leg.  In the story, he's Joe-Jim, two independent, sometimes bickering, heads on one body.  Why not have a two-headed character?  It's not like it costs any more on radio than two normal people.  I suppose it was the need to condense a novella to half an hour: losing a head is essentially losing a spare character who takes up time but doesn't really add anything to the plot.

For similar reasons, the details of Hugh's time with the mutants, and his return to his own people-- something which took long enough in the story for Hugh's hair to turn grey --are compressed to the point where they seem to take hours.  Most damaging is that we don't hear about Hugh gradually educating himself via Joe-Jim's library.  In the episode, everyone already seems to know enough that their unawareness of the greater world seems a little unlikely.  It doesn't help that we also get nothing of how the significance of science and history has been lost.

On the upside, the episode does come to a more definite conclusion than the story, if perhaps not as realistic.  However abruptly Heinlein leaves off there, it does make sense that, in a world so set in its ways, Hugh is going to have to depend on a slow cascade: convincing a few open-minded people, who will convince others, and so on.  But the Dimension X ending is far more satisfying on an emotional level.  Perhaps the best ending would be one with Heinlein's logic, but better prepared for, and giving more of a sense of completion with the vision of gradual enlightenment.  But that may be too much to accomplish in a half-hour adaptation of a story that probably runs a little under 20,000 words.

Second up, "Courtesy," broadcast sixty years ago last week, July 26, 1951.  The story by Clifford D. Simak was originally published in the August 1951 of Astounding Science Fiction.  "Wait," you may say, "a story from the August 1951 issue, broadcast on July 26, 1951?"  You'll notice that Astounding publisher Street & Smith was the show's sponsor. And while adapting classic stories from past issues (like "Universe") showed how good the magazine could be, wouldn't it be an even better advertisement to adapt a story from the very issue then on the newsstand?  Hear it tonight, read it tomorrow!

What if you already read Astounding, but didn't listen to Dimension X?  Well, they've got you then, too.  The August issue carried a full-page advertisement for Dimension X, noting its upcoming adaptation of that very issue's "Courtesy."  Read it today, hear it tonight!

(The ad also, by the way, gives the date of broadcast as Sunday, July 29.  Apparently, NBC changed the  show's timeslot sometime after the issue went to press.  Up to June 17, Dimension X aired on Sundays, before switching to Thursdays with the June 21 episode, according to Wikipedia.)

It sounds like this recording was an off-air of the broadcast, by someone who couldn't quite get a clear signal.  You'll notice occasional music and crooning intruding from some other program.

This is a much less successful adaptation than "Universe."  Although, to be fair, the story itself is only good, where it could have been much more powerful.  At his height, Simak was a master of mood.  The palpable sense of isolation and detachment is what makes his Way Station one of my favorite novels, for instance.  In "Courtesy," he sets a tone of impotent anticipation of inevitable doom.  I particularly liked the description of the graves getting more shallow and makeshift with time as there are fewer, weaker hands to make them.  The doctor kills himself right after the commander rakes him over the coals, unable to face the responsibility for condemning the expedition to destruction by not checking the labels on the serum until it was too late to recall the ship.

The problem is, he doesn't do nearly so good a job setting up the most important element of the story: that the expedition dies, essentially, from its own pride and dignity, which earned the natives' enmity by putting them automatically in the role of inferiors.  Although we get a couple of mentions of forcibly keeping the natives out of the camp, the story shows little concern, though, for pride and dignity, per se.  And the natives' concern for protocol is spoken of at one point, but never seen.  So when we learn that the junior crewman unknowingly saved himself by showing deference to a native, the revelation has little impact.  To have a really effective tragedy, it's necessary to be well aware of what turns out to be the fatal flaw.  The burial scene, otherwise so effective, shows the missed opportunity.  Simak could have used this as a more overt demonstration of the crew's dignity, how they feel the need to give their fellows a "decent" burial, even when their ability effectively to do so is gone.  Touches like this would have made it crushing when we find that the commander is himself dying.  We'd know emotionally that this is a man who, even when he knows what the answer is, can't bring himself to beg the natives for help.

Ernest Kinoy's adaptation doesn't help matters.  Simak's mood of doom is all but gone.  He inserts an odd and pointless foray into the natives' village.  And what's worst, he thoroughly botches the ending.  In the story, the disease is a real disease, a virus.  Literalizing the problem by making pride and arrogance into some sort of morality-borne disease, pretty much destroys suspension of disbelief.  (It also begs the question of how humans came up with a serum for it in the first place, if there's no physical disease agent.)  Kinoy also changes the way in which the junior crewman is saved.  In the story, the reason why he steps aside and lets the native pass is that he was momentarily startled.  The alien then sneaks into camp and cures the ailing crewman with a laying-on of hands.  Kinoy probably thought he was improving on Simak by making the crewman deliberately step aside, making him his own savior through his more democratic worldview.  But really, it undermines the sense of tragedy, as does eliminating the captain's knowing refusal to save himself.  In Simak's story, the cured crewman is no better than the others, just luckier.  Simak emphasizes the flaw in the humans by making his salvation purely accidental: something that, under ordinary circumstances, he would unwittingly have prevented by his ingrained behavior.

Incidentally, Kinoy also adds the specific distance (a million light years, which would put it in intergalactic space) and date (1997!!).

Next week: Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt," broadcast August 9, 1951... and maybe an extra.