Apr 24, 1955··1 Season
Adventure • Mystery • Action
From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future — adventures in which you will live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds.
For three glorious years on the NBC radio network, beginning in the spring of 1955, X Minus One delivered the finest science fiction ever broadcast over the American airwaves. While television was still finding its feet and the pulps were stacked three-deep on every newsstand in the country, a small crew of New York radio professionals — staff writers Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts at the helm — pulled the very best stories from the pages of Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and turned them into half-hour audio masterpieces that have never been bettered.
The roll call of authors is the roll call of the genre's Golden Age: Ray Bradbury's haunted Mars and his nurseries full of lions. Robert Heinlein's generation ships and his rolling roads. Isaac Asimov's six suns going dark and his deep-space mutinies. Theodore Sturgeon's flying saucers and his charming villains. Philip K. Dick's reality coming unstitched at the seams. Robert Sheckley's wishing-machines and his town criminals. Frederik Pohl's endlessly repeating Tuesdays. Murray Leinster's first contacts and his chatty time-travelling phone calls. The names go on and on, and so do the worlds they built.
Hosted by announcer Fred Collins, performed by some of the finest character actors of the New York studios, scored with shivery electronic effects, and launched each week by a rocket-roar countdown that became the most famous ten seconds in radio drama, X Minus One adapted its source material with care, with intelligence, and with a quiet, grown-up appetite for the big ideas the genre was just beginning to explore: artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation, mass advertising, colonial guilt, the ethics of discovery, the loneliness of deep space, and the strange small horror of finding out that the world you thought you knew is not, perhaps, the one you actually live in.
The show ran for 126 broadcasts before the network pulled the plug in January 1958, with one final, isolated revival episode produced in 1973. It is, by common consent of radio historians, the longest-running and finest adult science fiction drama ever broadcast on American radio. Every surviving episode has been preserved by the Old Time Radio Researchers and is freely available to listen to today, sounding as fresh, as suspenseful, as funny, and as quietly devastating as it did when your grandparents heard it the first time around.
So dim the lamps. Pour yourself something cold. Find a comfortable chair. Tune in your radio — or your phone, or your computer, or whatever the twenty-first century has handed you instead — and let Fred Collins start the countdown.
X minus five... four... three... two... X Minus One!
For three glorious years on the NBC radio network, beginning in the spring of 1955, X Minus One delivered the finest science fiction ever broadcast over the American airwaves. While television was still finding its feet and the pulps were stacked three-deep on every newsstand in the country, a small crew of New York radio professionals — staff writers Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts at the helm — pulled the very best stories from the pages of Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction and turned them into half-hour audio masterpieces that have never been bettered.
The roll call of authors is the roll call of the genre's Golden Age: Ray Bradbury's haunted Mars and his nurseries full of lions. Robert Heinlein's generation ships and his rolling roads. Isaac Asimov's six suns going dark and his deep-space mutinies. Theodore Sturgeon's flying saucers and his charming villains. Philip K. Dick's reality coming unstitched at the seams. Robert Sheckley's wishing-machines and his town criminals. Frederik Pohl's endlessly repeating Tuesdays. Murray Leinster's first contacts and his chatty time-travelling phone calls. The names go on and on, and so do the worlds they built.
Hosted by announcer Fred Collins, performed by some of the finest character actors of the New York studios, scored with shivery electronic effects, and launched each week by a rocket-roar countdown that became the most famous ten seconds in radio drama, X Minus One adapted its source material with care, with intelligence, and with a quiet, grown-up appetite for the big ideas the genre was just beginning to explore: artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation, mass advertising, colonial guilt, the ethics of discovery, the loneliness of deep space, and the strange small horror of finding out that the world you thought you knew is not, perhaps, the one you actually live in.
The show ran for 126 broadcasts before the network pulled the plug in January 1958, with one final, isolated revival episode produced in 1973. It is, by common consent of radio historians, the longest-running and finest adult science fiction drama ever broadcast on American radio. Every surviving episode has been preserved by the Old Time Radio Researchers and is freely available to listen to today, sounding as fresh, as suspenseful, as funny, and as quietly devastating as it did when your grandparents heard it the first time around.
So dim the lamps. Pour yourself something cold. Find a comfortable chair. Tune in your radio — or your phone, or your computer, or whatever the twenty-first century has handed you instead — and let Fred Collins start the countdown.
X minus five... four... three... two... X Minus One!