If you read the nov­els and sto­ries of Ursu­la K. LeGuin and J.G. Bal­lard, you drop your­self into invent­ed real­i­ties both over­whelm­ing­ly alien and unset­tling­ly famil­iar. And if you heard them on the radio — That Most Inti­mate of All Media, so they say — would­n’t those qual­i­ties take on a new inten­si­ty? Thanks to CBC Radio’s Van­ish­ing Point, a sci­ence-fic­tion anthol­o­gy series which ran from the mid-1980s to the ear­ly 90s, you can do just that and find out for your­self what it feels like to have them piped more or less direct­ly into your mind’s eye. Fans of both LeGuin and Bal­lard may take excep­tion to the straight label­ing of them as “sci­ence fic­tion” authors, and right­ly so. The for­mer’s work belongs as much to the tra­di­tion of fan­ta­sy as to that of sci-fi, and in both modes does a lot of detailed soci­o­log­i­cal world-build­ing; the lat­ter’s dark psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion and near-non­fic­tion­al use of the mod­ern world always pre­vent­ed easy cat­e­go­riza­tion. Still, I sus­pect that the mak­ers of Van­ish­ing Point not just knew all this, but under­stood its appeal.

They must also have real­ized that nei­ther LeGuin nor Bal­lard had grown famous for their adapt­abil­i­ty. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heav­en got made twice for tele­vi­sion, to vary­ing opin­ions; opin­ions var­ied even more when her Earth­sea books more recent­ly became a Sci Fi Chan­nel minis­eries and a film from Hayao Miyaza­k­i’s ani­ma­tion stu­dio. Bal­lard’s nov­el of auto-wreck-eroti­cism Crash became a cult favorite in the hands of David Cro­nen­berg, but usu­al­ly his work cross­es into oth­er media in a more bizarre fash­ion (such as the tele­vi­sion short of Crash we fea­tured last year). But radio can han­dle pret­ty much any­thing such imag­i­na­tive writ­ers can throw at it, as you’ll hear in Van­ish­ing Point’s six-part adap­ta­tion of LeGuin’s The Dis­pos­sessed at the top of the post, or in the Inter­net Archive playlist of its six adapt­ed Bal­lard sto­ries just above. His­to­ry, alas, has­n’t record­ed the reac­tion that LeGuin, always out­spo­ken about oth­ers’ treat­ments of her worlds, had to these CBC dra­mas. When Rick McGrath of jgballard.ca sent Bal­lard him­self CDs of all the pro­duc­tions in 2004, he received “a great note from him explain­ing he’d love to lis­ten to them, but he has yet to buy a CD play­er.” And if I had to make a guess, I’d say that vision­ary of our alien­at­ed, frag­ment­ed tech­no­log­i­cal future nev­er got around to pick­ing one up.

Find more sci-fi radio drama­ti­za­tions in the relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

X Minus One: More Clas­sic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Aldous Hux­ley Reads Dra­ma­tized Ver­sion of Brave New World

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

The Very First Film of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Star­ring Bal­lard Him­self (1971)

J.G. Bal­lard on Sen­sa­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Though I sel­dom long for my native cul­ture when abroad, when the need for a hit of Amer­i­cana does arise (and I say this cur­rent­ly writ­ing from Seoul, South Korea), I fill my iPod with old time radio. Many shows from Amer­i­ca’s “Gold­en Age” of wire­less broad­cast­ing can fill this need, but one could do much worse than Dimen­sion X, the ear­ly-1950s sci­ence-fic­tion pro­gram we fea­tured ear­li­er this month, or its late-1950s suc­ces­sor X Minus One, whose episodes you can also find at the Inter­net Archive. Both show­case Amer­i­can cul­ture at its mid-20th-cen­tu­ry finest: for­ward-look­ing, tem­pera­men­tal­ly bold, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly adept, and sat­u­rat­ed with earnest­ness but for the occa­sion­al sur­pris­ing­ly know­ing irony or bleak edge of dark­ness. That last comes cour­tesy of these shows’ writ­ing tal­ent, a group which includes such canon­i­cal names as Philip K. Dick, Ray Brad­bury, Isaac Asi­mov, and Robert Hein­lein.

X Minus One’s run, which last­ed from April 1955 to Jan­u­ary 1958, includ­ed a heap­ing help­ing of the evi­dent­ly high­ly radio-adapt­able Ray Brad­bury: his sto­ries “And The Moon Be Still As Bright,” “Mars is Heav­en,” “The Veldt,” “Dwellers in Silence,” “Zero Hour,” “To the Future,” and “Mar­i­onettes, Inc.,” all appeared as episodes. From Robert A. Hein­lein’s hard­er-bit­ten body of work the show pro­duced “Uni­verse,” “Requiem,” and “The Roads Must Roll.” Isaac Asi­mov, one of the most sci­en­tif­ic of that era’s sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers, wrote the source mate­r­i­al for “Night­fall,” “C‑Chute,” and “Host­ess.” The pen of Philip K. Dick, sure­ly the most pure­ly imag­i­na­tive of the bunch, for its part pro­duced “The Defend­ers” and “Colony.” Amer­i­ca let fly all sorts of visions of the future back then, from the opti­mistic to the pes­simistic, the utopi­an to the dystopi­an, the pro­gres­sive to the regres­sive. The afore­men­tioned writ­ers did it best by mix­ing all those sen­si­bil­i­ties into each of their visions, which you can hear, along with those of many oth­ers, in X Minus One’s robust archive. You can stream sev­er­al of the episodes below.

“The Defend­ers” (Philip K. Dick)

“Night­fall” (Isaac Asi­mov)

“Zero Hour” (Ray Brad­bury)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Orson Welles Vin­tage Radio: The War of the Worlds That Pet­ri­fied a Nation

The Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Series Fea­tures 24 Free Plays About Great Sci­en­tists and Sci­en­tif­ic Endeav­ors

Isaac Asimov’s Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sic, The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy, Dra­ma­tized for Radio (1973)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Enthu­si­asts of Amer­i­can radio dra­ma usu­al­ly place the for­m’s “Gold­en Age” as begin­ning in the 1920s and end­ing, almost at the stroke of tele­vi­sion’s mass adop­tion, in the 1950s. NBC’s Dimen­sion X, which ran in 1950 and 1951, came some­what late to the game, but it did more than its part to give “old time radio” a strong last decade — indeed, per­haps its strongest. Oth­er famous “seri­ous” sci­ence-fic­tion pro­grams had aired in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, but Dimen­sion X made its mark by adapt­ing short sto­ries by acknowl­edged mas­ters of the craft: Isaac Asi­mov, Ray Brad­bury, Robert Hein­lein, and even a non-genre-bound lit­er­ary mind like Kurt Von­negut. All of these world-cre­ators knew well the val­ue of imag­i­na­tion, and radio, in its way, stood then and remains today the most evoca­tive, imag­i­na­tion-dri­ven medi­um of them all. At the Inter­net Archive (cer­tain­ly a more con­ve­nient old time radio source than the boot­leg cas­sette tapes I used to have to buy) you can down­load all of Dimen­son X’s “adven­tures in time and space, tran­scribed in future tense.”

If you don’t know where in this spec­u­la­tive field of time and space to begin, we’ve high­light­ed a few Dimen­sion X episodes drawn from works of the most notable authors. June 10, 1950’s “The Green Hills of Earth”, based upon the Robert Hein­lein sto­ry of the same name, relates the life of “Noisy” Rhys­ling, a blind space-age trou­ba­dour who real­izes he must pay trib­ute to the plan­et he long ago left behind. The very next week’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”, one of Ray Brad­bury’s many works adapt­ed for the show, describes the apoc­a­lypse through the process­es of the self-main­tain­ing high-tech mir­a­cle house. June 17, 1951’s “Peb­ble in the Sky” takes its theme from the epony­mous Isaac Asi­mov nov­el that thrusts a 20th-cen­tu­ry every­man into a com­plex future of a galac­tic empire, a radioac­tive Earth, and manda­to­ry euthana­sia at age six­ty. And in Feb­ru­ary 11, 1950’s “Report on the Barn­house Effect”, only the show’s third broad­cast, we hear the tes­ti­mo­ny of a tele­ki­net­ic — one who, giv­en that Kurt Von­negut wrote the orig­i­nal sto­ry, it won’t sur­prise you to hear the gov­ern­ment imme­di­ate­ly (and hap­less­ly) tries to weaponize.

“The Green Hills of Earth” (Robert Hein­lein)

“There Will Come Soft Rains” (Ray Brad­bury)

“Peb­ble in the Sky” (Isaac Asi­mov)

“Report on the Barn­house Effect” (Kurt Von­negut)

Relat­ed con­tent:

Orson Welles Vin­tage Radio: The War of the Worlds That Pet­ri­fied a Nation

The Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Series Fea­tures 24 Free Plays About Great Sci­en­tists and Sci­en­tif­ic Endeav­ors

Isaac Asimov’s Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sic, The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy, Dra­ma­tized for Radio (1973)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.