Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "At the Post" 3/27/57

The fate of humanity might be in the hands of a man who handicaps horses for a living.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "The Map Makers" 9/26/56

A ship is hopelessly lost in deep space and the only chance of making home rests on the shoulders of... a blind man!

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "Hallucination Orbit" 5/15/56

A man stranded alone on a planet begins to hallucinate beautiful women. He realizes they are hallucinations, though. So when a woman shows up to rescue him, how does he know SHE'S real?

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "A Gun for Dinosaur" 3/7/56

Stories of Ray Bradbury: "A Sound of Thunder"  9/6/2010

I've featured "A Gun for Dinosaur" before, but I thought it would be fun to pair it up with a BBC adaptation of Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder." Two classic short stories highlighting the various dangers of time travel. Dangers we would all ignore, of course, for a chance to see live dinosaurs. Same reason we'd go to a real-life Jurassic Park if we could. 

Click HERE for "A Gun for Dinosaur"

Click HERE for "A Sound of Thunder."

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "First Contact" 10/6/55

A human ship meets an alien ship in deep space. Both sides would like to make friends, but can they afford to trust one another?

The ending is significantly different from the original novella written by Murray Leinster and not as satisfying, but it's still a good story.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "Chain of Command" 11/21/56

A talking mouse living in a secret atomic research lab asks that the mouse traps in the lab be removed. If a mouse asks you to do something, do it. It turns out they can wield a lot of influence.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "The Snowball Effect" 8/14/56

A sociological experiment goes awry. The result might be a world dominated by a Ladies' Sewing Circle.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "Reluctant Heroes: 12/19/56

Chapman has spent three years on a small moon base and is anxious to return to Earth. Even when offered a huge amount of money to stay, he refuses to do so. There's nothing that will make him stay. 

Well, perhaps one thing might make him stay.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Mapmakers" 9/26/56

A freak accident leaves a starship stranded in unknown space without a way of finding Earth. A blind man might provide them with their only hope.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "And the Moon Be Still As Bright" 9/22/55

An excellent adaptation of one of the best stories from Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "Hello Tomorrow" 2/29/56

An underground, post-nuclear war society is constructed around maintaining genetic perfection among its population. So when an "imperfect" man and a "perfect" woman fall in love, trouble ensues.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Haunted Corpse" 12/12/57

A scientist invents a machine capable of transferring minds into different bodies. His intended use for it might not be completely ethical.

Click HERE to listen or download.


My review of the story on which this episode is based is available HERE.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Category Inventer" 6/27/57

In the future, everyone is assigned a category according to the work they do. When a man is replaced at his job by a robot, he has to find a new job and thus be entered into another category. This will take time and training, because it's not as if he can just make up a new category and get paid for doing a non-existent job.

Right?

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "Project Mastodon" 6/5/56

Three men travel back in time 50,000 years. Their plan: Found a new nation then come back to the present and seek diplomatic recognition. The first problem they face is getting someone to believe them. The second problem may render the first problem moot, since it involves their time machine getting wrecked by an angry mastodon, stranding them in the past.

This episode is based on a short story by Clifford Simak that was later expanded into an excellent novel titled Mastodonia.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Last Martian" 8/7/56

A man claims to be the last surviving Martian, whose consciousness has been somehow transferred into the body of an Earthman.

It might be a mistake to simply assume he's delusional.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "Skulking Permit" 2/15/56

A lost colony re-establishes contact with Earth. They need to demonstrate they are civilized, but unlike any self-respecting civilization, they don't have any crime. So the Mayor appoints one of the locals to do some stealing and maybe commit a murder or two.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "Junkyard" 2/22/56

A space ship is stranded on a planet because the crew is gradually losing its knowledge of how to operate the ship.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Castaways" 9/15/55

Before conducting a bomb test, the military must evacuate primitive natives from the remote island chosen for the test. But the natives aren't necessarily that primitive. For that matter, they aren't necessarily "natives."

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "Double Dare" 12/19/57

Two of Earth's best engineers are sent to an alien planet as part of a contest to prove which planet is more advanced. But they might have to be better than the best if they want to ever get home again.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Friday's Favorite OTR

X Minus One: "The Lights on Precipice Peak" 3/13/57

A mountain climber trapped in a crevice is rescued by someone who... well, who doesn't hail from these parts.

Click HERE to listen or download.