Dimension X and X Minus 1

Thought I'd just take a few minutes to tell you about my new late night listening habit.

When the skies are clear, well, it's astronomy time, and I'm out there with my 10x50s and a drink, enjoying trying to track down the Messier Objects and stars of interest I can see in between the large sycamore trees that dominate my garden area. But when skies are cloudy, lit sickly orange by the streelights, I find other entertainment.

I've recently downloaded through my podcatcher a number of episodes of 1950-51 US radio series Dimension X, and later show X Minus 1. Both are thirty minute sci fi radio playlets, often adaptations of short stories by classic sci fi authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov that had previously turned up in print in magazines like "Astounding Science Fiction." Several, for instance, are taken from Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles".

Believe me, listening to them outside in the dark is a really atmospheric experience! The stories are of course straight out of the 50s, with maniacally dramatic music and yelling actors at the moment of the "reds under the bed" reveal that half the crewmen of your ship are actually alien agents, or that the parade an eccentric businessman has organised to promote "Mars Day" is in fact a full on Martian Invasion, complete with ray guns. Of course, whatever women show up in these stories are there to scream and be neurotic, but yet, the stories still have more depth and imagination than most of the B pics that were being shown in the cinemas at that time - one talks about how a miniturised man and women act as the beginning of a complex society that evolves and dies on an electron orbiting a proton within 10 of our full scale seconds.

You didn't get that in "It Came from Outer Space"!!!

Ray Bradbury - The Silver Locusts

This shift, I've been getting through my elegant, silver be-covered 1960s paperback of The Silver Locusts, a 1950 Ray Bradbury novel that seems to have been collated out of a serial, or collection of short stories, from Pulps like Amazing Stories.

I've not finished it yet, it is hard to get a proper reading stint in when you're surrounded by loud folk whose idea of a cultural decision is whether to watch "Top Gear" on Dave or Dave Ja Vu. But after a sticky start where the rather "folksy" language somewhat bogged me down, I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the story by the dreamlike construction and western pioneer fairytale atmosphere.

The chapter where someone constructs "The House of Usher" on Mars, and populates it with double bluff calling robot doppelgangers, is an absolute standalone standout. The Martians themselves, in contrast with the zippered green suits and antennae creatures of the sci fi of the times, are never truly revealed in themselves - they exist only as delusions of loss and desire in the humans that see them.

Think of the alien manifestations in Carl Sagan's "Contact", and The Gelf of Red Dwarf, and no doubt many more besides, and you think of the apparent influence of this tale. I couldn't also help but think of the reports of UFO encounters described as "High Strangeness", which again this novel seems to predict compared with the friendly Adamski "Nordic" Extraterrestrials, or on the other hand the terrifying Hopkinsville Goblins found in reports of the time.

Better known in the US as The Martian Chronicles, a big budget TV miniseries was made that I've never seen, but attracted derisory reviews. I hope to track it down soon.