Exploring Tomorrow
What It Was
Exploring Tomorrow billed itself, without much modesty, as "the first science-fiction show of science-fictioneers, by science-fictioneers and for science-fictioneers — real science fiction for a change!" It arrived on the Mutual network on December 4, 1957, slotting into the Wednesday 8:05 hour that had previously belonged to Gangbusters and Counterspy — a pulpy crime block now ceded to rocket ships and Galactic Imperial Armed Forces. Each episode ran 25 minutes, and the cast was drawn from the deep bench of New York radio: Mandel Kramer, Bryna Raeburn, Lawson Zerbe, Lon Clark, with Mason Adams, Larry Haines, Bret Morrison, and others rotating through. Bill Mahr and Guy Wallace handled the announcing; Sanford Marshall produced and directed. The theme music was "As Time Goes By," a curious choice for science fiction — more Casablanca than Deneb — but it cued listeners that the show meant to take itself seriously.
The Campbell Connection
The host carried the show's claim to legitimacy. The opening announcement introduced him as "the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, John Campbell, Jr.," and Campbell was, by 1957, the most consequential editor the field had ever produced. He had discovered or shaped Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt — Asimov later called him "the most powerful force in science fiction ever." Each episode opened with a Campbell monologue on the cultural, psychological, or sociological implications of the night's story, followed by the standing declaration: "The program you are about to hear is fiction, science fiction. We make no guarantees, however, how long it will remain fiction." His role appears to have extended past narration into commentary and possibly script editing, and the writer list reads like an Astounding contents page: Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Gordon R. Dickson, Randall Garrett, George O. Smith, Tom Godwin. Campbell even adapted one of his own stories, "The Escape," published under his pseudonym Don A. Stuart, about a young scientist fleeing a Population Control Commission.
A Brief Run
Twenty-nine episodes were made; the show closed on June 13, 1958, after roughly twenty-eight weeks. OTR researchers tend to group it with Dimension X, X Minus One, 2000 Plus, and Beyond Tomorrow as one of the principal science fiction anthologies of the radio era — though it never escaped the shadow of the first two, and one retrospective site bluntly calls it "a poor man's version of X Minus One." Twenty-six of the twenty-nine broadcasts survive in collectors' hands, several spliced together from American Forces Network repeats and carrying, as one cataloger put it, "a lot of scratch." The surviving titles hint at what the show was reaching for: "Country Boy," Silverberg's tale of a Montana farmer chewed up by future New York; "Dreams," set in a post-apocalyptic world where a state bureaucrat seeks psychiatric help for recurring visions of his own death; a Poul Anderson piece about scientists who seed a planet with memory-wiped colonists who develop fast enough to alarm an imperial military. The right people were in the room — a serious host, working New York actors, writers at the top of the field — and not quite enough time, on a network whose affiliate-based scheduling never gave its prestige programs much room to find an audience.