Perhaps the best science-fiction radio series ever produced was X Minus One. NBC broadcast 126 episodes from 1955 to 1958, with stories from preeminent writers of the period including Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Bloch, Frederik Pohl and Fritz Leiber. 

And Clifford D. Simak. Simak’s novels and short stories landed him a Nebula Award and three Hugo Awards, plus two Retrospective Hugo Awards.

Six of his stories were adapted for X Minus One, including Courtesy. That radio play told “the story of the second expedition to the planet of Landro” in which 180 men attempted to colonize a “god-forsaken sphere” already inhabited by an indigenous population.  

In Simak’s tale, the planet’s “aborigines” are described as “strange, ugly little people” and “cave rats” and, when it is suggested they may hold an important answer to a peril faced by the humans, one crewmember promises the commander he will “get a few of them and beat it out of them.” And it gets worse from there.

Gene Roddenberry was a fan of early pulp sci-fi, and the stories written in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s taught him about the genre but, when he committed his view of the future to paper in the 1964 Star Trek is… pitch and wrote The Cage pilot episode, his heroes would act very differently from Simak’s. Roddenberry wanted humans to explore strange new worlds and seek out new civilizations, not beat members of those civilizations to death.

Click the YouTube link below to listen to Courtesy, recorded in 1955, and contrast it to the spirit of The Cage, filmed only nine years later.

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Simak’s story offers up a weak, mystical note of redemption at the end that does little to erase the ugliness of what came before. But I called X Minus One the greatest of the sci-fi radio series because the show often delivered great tales. 

Cold Equations, broadcast just after Courtesy, is one of those. The hard sci-fi story absolutely sticks the landing, and adventures like these also inspired Roddenberry.