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60 Greatest Science Fiction Shows Selected By Ray Bradbury

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H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Fredric Brown, Fletcher Pratt, Phillip K. Dick, William Tenn, Murray Leinster, Robert Sheckley, Frederik Pohl, Gordon R. Dickson, Theodore Sturgeon, James Blish, H. Beam Piper, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Sheckley, and Ray Bradbury. A veritable pantheon of great science fiction authors.

"The War of the Worlds," "The Martian Chronicles," "Donovan's Brain," "Earth Abides," "Nightfall," "20,000 Leagues under the Sea," "The Roads Must Roll," "Knock," "Frankenstein," "Lulungameena" (a Dorsai story), "Dream of Armageddon," and "The Country of the Blind." A library of science fiction classics.

Excellent stories, excellent authors, well done plays. One of the selling points for science fiction back in the 50's was its "predictive" aspect. Today's fiction was touted as tomorrow's fact. I loved scifi as a kid, but on listening to the plays, I was somewhat amused at how badly most of the shows got the future wrong. Some of the "future" dates from many of the stories have come and gone without the fabulous scientific achievements presented in the stories. Two stories stand out as highly predictive, however.

"A Logic Named Joe" was a comedy, but it predicted not only the internet, but also two of the internet's greatest problems: loss of privacy and unrestricted access to sensitive information. "The Roads Must Roll" missed badly when it predicted that mass transportation in the USA would be on gigantic conveyor belts, but it also predicted the great mischief that a handful of political zealots could wreak when they commandeered a portion of that mass transport system.

I've recently gotten into old-time radio broadcasts and this one is my favorite. It really is the "Theater of Imagination." The writing is superb and suspenseful on these shows. I can't wait to introduce my son to these broadcasts.