October 30 1938: Orson Welles presents a frighteningly realistic portrayal of our world overrun by Martian war machines. Adapted for a contemporary American audience and performed as a ‘live’ news broadcast, Welles’ rendition of The War of the Worlds was arguably the most famous – and infamous – broadcast in American history. Welles was subsequently obliged to apologize for the hysteria caused by the show.

Its potency derived not only from the original story’s merits, but from the power of the medium itself to influence the imagination, not to mention the eagerness of the human psyche to accept such a nightmarish scenario as gospel, with very little prompting or hesitation. Perhaps it is this willingness to accept the broadcast word as truth that may ultimately lead us down the dark road to a dystopian future. Certainly, it demonstrates why aspiring conquerors and dictators always seek out the radio stations as their primary objective in seizing power.

Radio producers of Welles’ day were acutely aware of how receptive and malleable was the mass consciousness of the public. The inherent dangers were equally obvious, carrying the implications for Dystopia. While most of radio drama was, admittedly, purely escapist fare, many producers and writers must have felt the need to warn and frighten, for dystopian themes were a popular venue, particularly in the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era. The CBS Radio Workshop devoted extended airtime to productions of Brave New World and The Space Merchants, as did the Theater Guild on the Air when it presented a version of 1984. They were not the first – Karl Capek’s 1920 stage play R.U.R. found its way onto the airwaves as early as 1937. During the war, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation undertook its own form of manipulation of mass consciousness with a series called Nazi Eyes on Canada, which proposed an inevitable future where Canada wept under the jackbooted heels of a victorious Third Reich – unless, of course, listeners were to rush out at once to purchase war bonds. Welles made a guest appearance here too.

Picture: Orson Welles creating radio history.

The 1950’s saw an explosion of anthology series dedicated entirely to science fiction. Several anthology series appeared, beginning with Two Thousand Plus and Dimension X.  Sadly, much of the former series has not survived, but the latter has come down to us intact. Its dystopian efforts were numerous, among them dramatizations of Bradbury’s To the Future (a.k.a. The Fox and the Forest) – in which a couple attempt to escape a totalitarian, war-torn future for the visceral delights of modern-day Mexico – and The Last Objective, a vision of a future war that has so devastated the Earth that Man has been forced underground to continue on with his favorite pastime.  Other series followed. Exploring Tomorrow was hosted by John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding. It offered several nightmarish visions of the future, including The Trouble with Robots, the story of a dictator who puts his faith in a mechanized security force, and Overpopulation, in which a diplomat pleads with a representative of the Venus colony to allow emigration from

an overcrowded Earth. Perhaps the most popular science fiction radio anthology was X Minus One, which aired  for three years, from 1955 to 1958. Among its more salient dystopian efforts were versions of Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll, Robert Sheckley’s The Seventh Victim, Philip Dick’s The Defenders,  and Fritz Leiber’s Appointment in Tomorrow.

The hugely successful, multi-genre anthology Suspense, which ran for twenty years on CBS, produced several episodes could be interpreted as dystopian in nature, but only two clearly stand out as fitting the criterion – in 2462,  a poet is sentenced to death for being ‘non-productive’; in The Wait, a futuristic secret police task force relies on human greed and self-interest to infiltrate and wipe out a cell of social insurgents.

The proliferation of television ended the Radio era in the early Sixties. Though radio drama continued, its popularity was on the wane. The only truly successful series through the Seventies and into the Eighties was the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Computer overlords, institutionalized virtual reality, capital punishment presented as primetime entertainment – these are a few of the many dystopian ideas which appeared on the program.

Some others: Who Made Me? portrayed a caste-oriented matriarchal society in which an elite-born couple’s dedication to the system is tested when their son demonstrates  only lower class potential. Resident Killer postulates what use – or is it abuse? – a pacifistic society has for those whose capacity for violence is hardwired into their psyche. Prisoner of the Machines is the story of a robot-controlled POW camp. Unfortunately, someone neglects to tell the robot guards when the war has ended.

With the demise of Radio Mystery Theater in 1982, the major American networks abandoned radio drama. National Public Radio still made occasional efforts, including a 7 hour dramatization of Walter Miller’s apocalyptic epic A Canticle for Leibowitz, which traced the history of a monastery that sought to rediscover science during the long dark ages following a nuclear holocaust. A fairly recent NPR series specifically commissioned to portray life in the post-millennial era – appropriately called 2000 X – presented several dystopian offerings, including H.G. Wells’ Dream of Armageddon,  Robert Sheckley’s Watchbird,
	Harlan Ellison’s ‘Repent Harlequin!’, Said the Tick-Tock Man, and Frank Robinson’s The Hunting Season.
Picture: The radio adaptation of Fatherland is one of the most ambitious productions in modern radio history.	One of the most interesting episodes was a version of E.M. Forster’s early 20th century precautionary tale The Machine Stops. In the far distant future, Humankind has moved underground, becoming so reliant on a global computer complex for even the simplest daily needs that direct human interaction has become a repulsive notion (how the main character, Madam Vashtai, manages to have a son is not explained, at least not in the radio play). The original story was intended as a rebuttal against the then popular faith in technology as the solution to all of Man’s ills, an idea touted by many of the day’s futurists, among them H.G. Wells. Sadly – or perhaps thankfully – audio drama in America is now predominantly in the hands of independent producers. In Canada and Britain, however, professional radio drama was – and is – still very much alive. Among the more recognizable dystopian titles to come out of the BBC: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Trifids, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, and Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (better known as The Stars My Destination). Their two-hour rendition of Robert Harris’ Fatherland was one of the most poignant productions of the modern era of radio.

The above is only a sampling of what has been produced. The student of Dystopia will find virtually all of the genre’s themes well represented in the audio drama format. While the natural limitations of the medium preclude the myriad subtleties possible with the literary or cinematic format, radio dramatization does provide an ideal vehicle for the imagination to fill in the gaps, a means of inviting the listener to take an interactive role in bringing the experience to life. Perhaps it might even be argued that it prompts a temporary amalgamation of mind and machine, a potentially dystopian notion in and of itself…

Hearing these dramas, or learning more about them, is not difficult. Typing any of the series titles listed here, or simply “otr” (common acronym for Old Time Radio), into any search engine will conjure a plethora of online resources. You will find that most of the online community of otr hobbyists believe that these old shows should be shared freely, and there are many free download sites; even private vendors of CD’s generally only charge to cover the cost of shipping and materials.

In the juggernaut wake of television and film, the art of audio drama has largely disappeared from the popular consciousness. Even hardcore speculative fiction enthusiasts are generally not aware of the multitude of both rare and classic stories the medium has to offer. Perhaps it's time we strained to listen to those dim voices out of the past – they may have something to tell us about the future.