A Magazine on the Air

X Minus One's arrangement with Galaxy magazine gave it something almost no dramatic series has: an incoming supply of first-rate short stories by writers at the top of their form. The adaptations are respectful without being timid, and they keep the thing that makes written science fiction work — an idea followed all the way to its consequence.

It sounds, unavoidably, of the 1950s. The bureaucracies are grey-flannel, the domestic scenes are dated, the rockets are loud. Underneath that, the anxieties are recognisably ours: automation, advertising, the quiet violence of systems. Several of these half-hours could be re-recorded tomorrow with the same script.

The tone is unusually cool. No narrator winking, no organ chords. It trusts the story, which is why it has aged better than almost anything else in the fantastic on radio.