More Words, Deeper Hole

Grenville's Planet

A bored star explorer and his assistant explore the eponymous planet, the first terrestrial world to be found whose surface is entirely covered by water. As it turns out there are two small islands, complete with native animal life. On consideration the animals are hard to explain because once every century or so, exceptionally high tides raise the ocean levels well above the highest point of either island. As well, the islands should have been eroded away long ago. Their conclusion is some shadowy intelligence under the sea built the islands. Alas, First Contact does not go well.

Yeah, the explanation of why the manta-people built the island is odd. It's a preserve. Of what? Apparently a sense that natural worlds have animals living on land, I guess.

And that's it for SF 68. After this, it was replaced by Beyond Midnight (1968 - 1969), a supernatural anthology show also produced by Michael McCabe.

The Castaway

A starfarer, trapped on a savage planet, does its best through good works to win over the locals. This fails because the locals or at least the one who narrates this story is utterly convinced anything that thinks as well as he does but has a different form must die, lest the strangers dominate the area.

Well, at least the narrator is consistent in his views.

The Space Cow

A simple Martian doctor, trapped in what he sees as a dead-end job, is dragged into a scheme to treat a potentially valuable animal from Ganymede. The doctor considers this well out of his field of expertise and is even less enthusiastic about the whole thing when he learns that the Space Cow is the size of a large whale and he is expected to do his diagnosis from inside the digestive system of the animal.

This all works out well but the plan to treat the animal is very much an example of "we've thought up a daring and for all we know lethal gambit and we've decided you are the ideal person to carry it out." And really, him being a doctor doesn't come into the resolution as much as him just keeping his eyes and mind open rather than settling on a solution early on and ignoring contrary evidence.

Jenny With Wings

A young winged lady who believes she has found love consults a doctor over (among other things) her worry that she might not be able to have children; in the course of the conversation we see that her wings have greatly complicated her social life, generally not in positive ways. Alas for her ( Read more... )

links later.

A terminally-ill young boy hangs all his hope for salvatio on his realization that ( Read more... )

This is one of Bradbury's better known stories, perhaps his best known. In it, a man with more money than sense pays some people with more greed than sense to take him into the past to hunt dinosaurs. Although the people with the time machine are aware of the risk of altering history, they believe their precautions should be sufficient to prevent it and if they are not, at least heavy fines will be applied. This all ends fairly suboptimally.

I wonder if the new timeline is the one that leads to the "To the Future" timeline.

I'd like to say I cannot believe a company would be dumb enough to put all of history at risk to pocket some money but actually it is quite believable.

Back into the world of South African radio in the now mythical year of 1968. I wonder if SF 68 would have changed its name if it had lasted more than a year.

No links for these, I am afraid.

A spacecraft en route to Mars suffers a mission-killing mishap, leaving the craft, its crew and the passengers - mostly men but one woman, generally considered the obvious weakling - trapped in space. When it becomes clear help will not arrive in time to avoid at least some of the passenger's starving to death, the survivors turn to methods other than rationing to mitigate the food shortage.

There really isn't much point to have ( Read more... )

Homecoming

Unfortunately the sound quality on this episode was not great and I could not follow a lot of the dialogue.

A man wakes from what he is told was a long coma following an accident. Aided by his wife, he does his best to fit back into society but it becomes clear what he has been told cannot be the truth. This, of course, leads to a surprising revelation about what is really gong on.

And it really was a suprise revelation because while there are elements of horror to the fellow's predicament, his hosts are in fact rather benevolent and willing to put in a surprising amount of effort on behalf of a stranger.

I am not familiar with Arthur Sellings' fiction but I am tempted to keep an eye out for more. A short piece on him may be found here.

The Death Dust

A trio of astronauts make the first trip to the Moon; two of them explore the surface while the third stays with their vehicle. Unfortunately for them, the dust that makes up the Lunar surface turns out to highly toxic through some mechanism they lack the resources to work out [1].

With two of his companions dead and Earth growing rapidly before him, the remaining astronaut, safe for the moment in his suit, is given a very uncomfortable decision to make, since there's no way to rule out the toxic substance being a living organism that could spread across Earth in a virgin field epidemic.

This managed to get enough details about going to the Moon right it was a bit disappointing when he got something very wrong (the gravity thing, and the way the dust floated on the airless Moon, although perhaps it was charged). When the original story was written, very little was known about the surface of the Moon, although the speculation (referred to in the story) that it might be entirely free of dust was one of the lower probability ones.

As it turns out, you probably wouldn't want to breathe air tainted with regolith dust for an extended period because the stuff is made of tiny, extremely sharp fragments and given that the dust was doing bad things to the astronauts' space suits I cannot see it being good for alveoli.

All I know about this Frank Harvey is that he seems to have a very short and magazine specific career.

1: Although for some reason they do have a medicine for a hemorrhagic fever in their medical kit.

I should have begun with this:

SF 68, a short-lived series from—appropriately enough—1968, originated in South Africa and was produced and directed by the dean of radio drama in that country, Michael McCabe.

More details at the far end of the link.