More Words, Deeper Hole

Hello Tomorrow

Two thousand years after nuclear war scorched the Earth, subterranean survivors exist in a tightly regimented society obsessed with genetic purity. A forbidden romance forced one couple to flee but the only place they can run to is the surface!

Yeah, I was not the target market for this tale of radiation-soaked romance.

I was going to say it was odd the biological revelation near the end of this was not made beforehand but in fact I don't we can say for sure that it was not, only that people making it chose not to share it. Which could be quite plausible.

The Martian Chronicles

This adapts the following into a series of short vignettes:

"Rocket Summer": Climate change, rocket-style

"Ylla": A Martian woman dreams of the touch of an Earth man. Her husband turns out not to be into netorare.

"—And the Moon Be Still as Bright": The Earthmen learn that a previous expedition brought chicken pox to Mars, something the Martians have no resistance to. Reactions to this vary.

"The Shore": Humans settle on Mars en masse.

"The Off-Season": An entrepreneur's grand plan for his hot dog stand on Mars are sabotaged by global thermonuclear war on Earth.

"The Watchers": Most of the humans head back to the dying Earth for some reason.

"There Will Come Soft Rains": used as a frame for

"The Million-Year Picnic": In this version the family that gets incinerated in the original version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" instead flees to Mars, where the father seems hopeful that they will form the basis of the new population there.

Interesting creative decision to cram so many stories into just 30 minutes.

Perigis Wonderful Dolls

A young girl talks her mother into renting a marvelous talking doll whose first statements to them includes this song:

"You are big and tall
(something indistinct)
When men begin to fall
The doll will rule them all"

Contrary to what the narrator claims, I think there were signs the dolls were bad news. Also, that's one creepy sounding doll.

The dad seems awfully eager to believe his daughter is a pet-killing, national-security-violating monster.

The Man in the Moon

The Federal Bureau of Missing Persons gets clues to a years-long conspiracy behind a plague of disappearances, not that they get to do much with them.

This was a bit Rocketship Galileoy. On listening to it a second time, it occurs to be the radio signal in the beginning had to be reasonably powerful and spread over a fair territory.I wonder how many people heard it. Although it is supposed to a restricted frequency.

Destination Moon

If I have this right, this is a streamlined version of the screen play by James O'Hanlon,Robert A. Heinlein, and Rip Van Ronkel, itself based on Rocketship Galileo. This is a very straight-forward tale of a group of visionaries, plus one guy they bribe to come along, overcoming obstacles from obstructive bureaucrats to technical issues in the quest to reach and return from the Moon.

Does Carstairs go from wanting the Moon for the US to wanting it for a world government? If so, count this as an early example of the Overlook Effect.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this episode is that the Korean War breaks out part way through the broadcast.

This is a bit odd; the file was in the archive I downloaded but it's not listed on archive.org's site for Dimension X, so you cannot livestream it from there. If the episode mentions who adapted this, I missed it.

Tom Glazer provided the music for Rhysling's songs.

This is the well-known (to older fans, anyway) story of how shoddy maintenance and lack of diligence cost an engineer his eyesight and what he did after that. There doesn't seem to be any analog for workman's compensation in this future, so the unfortunate Rhysling is forced to spend the rest of his life singing for the coins he needs to finance his alcoholism. Oddly, although the story shows some sympathy for the down-trodden, there's not much hope offered that they could better their situation and the morale doesn't seem to be that workers need to organize.

Rhysling makes his mark rather than signing his name. I wonder if that means he's illiterate?

[added later]

Something I've missed every time I listened this before: the regulation that nearly screws over/saves Rhysling at the end of his career, the one intended to keep him from joy-riding in space, is "The Harriman Code", named after Delos Harriman. There's a certain amount of irony to that, given the issues Harriman had getting into space.

To The Future

A young couple desperately tries to escape a dystopic future by fleeing into the distant past of the 1950s. The authorities pursue, determined to drag the couple back to the doomed world of 2155.

This was re-used for X Minus One.

Knock

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room There was a knock on the
door..."

Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the two sentences at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

But it wasn't horrible, really.

Another one that was re-used for X Minus One and for good reason. It's arguably Brown's best known story and if it isn't, it should be.

Sadly, it relies on the antagonists being complete and utter saps, not uncommon in stories of this vintage. See also Randall Garrett's story "The Best Policy".

Report on the Barnhouse Effect

An elderly academic makes the mistake of revealing his stupendous psychic powers, which gets him drafted into Cold War posturing. He decides to strike out on his own, contributing to international relations in his own way; this decision also brings unwanted complications.

I don't think X Minus One did this.

Old Barnstaple meant well but I got the feeling I was listening to the backstory to Shinsekai yori...