X Minus One - Shocktroop

"Shocktroop" by Daniel F. Galouye (adapted by George Lefferts, November 28, 1957)


Courtesy of Internet Archive and OTRR.

X Minus One - The Coffin Cure

"The Coffin Cure" by Alan E. Nourse


Form back in 1957 comes a little story about researchers who think they've found a cure for the common cold.



Courtesy of the Internet Archive and The OTRR.

X Minus One - The Haunted Corpse

"The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl



Courtesy of Internet Archive and Old Time Radio Researchers Group

X Minus One - If You Was a Moklin

"If You Was a Moklin" by Murray Leinster



Courtesy of the Internet Archive and the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group.

X Minus One - Nightfall

"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov

X Minus One - The Lifeboat Mutiny

"The Lifeboat Mutiny" by Robert Sheckley




[via the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio Researchers Group]

X Minus One - Sam, This Is You

"Sam, This Is You" by Murray Leinster



Courtesy of Internet Archive and the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group

The Moon is Green

Today a tale from the incomparable Fritz Leiber.



The Moon is Green by Fritz Leiber (Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1952)

"Anybody who wanted to escape death could, by paying a very simple price—denial of life!"


This same story was adapted for the X Minus One radio program in 1957. (13MB MP3)

C-Chute

From the Old Time Radio show X Minus One here's an adaptation of one of Isaac Asimov's famous short stories, originally published in the October 1951 issue of Galaxy Magazine.

C-Chute (MP3 13 MB)

Tunnel Under the World

"On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming."

Tunnel Under the World by Frederik Pohl (13MB MP3)



Form the old time radio show X Minus One here's Frederik Pohl's classic sf story, "Tunnel Under the World," (Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955.) This is one of the best stories from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, in addition to being one of the trippiest. It's like a prototype of the kind of mind-bending tales that would later be associated with PKD.

The Defenders

I almost missed this one. Project Gutenberg added another PKD story.

The Defenders by Philip K. Dick

"No weapon has ever been frightful enough to put a stop to war — perhaps because we never before had any that thought for themselves!"

Update:

I just remembered that this is one the PKD stories adapted for the great old radio show X Minus One (MP3 13MB)

Space Invaders

I just watched the classic, I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), and actually thought it was pretty good for a 1950's sci-fi b-movie. I'm even more impressed after reading Bill Warren's essay on the film in his book Keep Watching the Skies! and finding out it was shot in only eight days. That's impressive. The plot is hopelessly hokey -- alien invaders from the Andromeda Galaxy take on human form in order to mate with Earth women -- but it's played with enough of a straight face that it doesn't lapse into self-parody. In an interesting twist, American firepower proves useless against the alien invaders. Instead they are ultimately done in by Rin-tin-tin's kin.

This and similar movies, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), are usually seem as expressing the Cold War paranoia of Communist infiltration, and not without reason. The first alien body snatcher stories do seem to have appeared around WWI at a time when the popular press was whipping up fears of German fifth columnists.

However, another perspective is to view the film in psychological terms as a dramatization of Capgras delusion which results in people believing that their spouse, friends, or close family members have been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. This type of story was a mainstay of the works of Philip K. Dick, even in his early short stories such as "Colony" which was adapted for the excellent 1950's radio show X Minus One. (Download mp3 13MB)

The most surprising thing was watching a scene in which one of the disguised aliens complains about the human urges he's having and realizing that this movie was the inspiration for the Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name" written by D.C. Fontana and Jerome Bixby, in which alien invaders from the Andromeda Galaxy take on human form and begin to experience human urges. Who would have thought?