X Minus One: Mr. Costello, Hero (July 3, 1956)

By: Theodore Sturgeon, George Lefferts - adaptation

Narrated by: Fred Collins

X Minus One premiered in April 1955 on NBC and ran until January 1958. Like its predecessor series, Dimension X, X Minus One featured stories by the greatest names in modern science fiction: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Robert Bloch, and many more.

Public Domain (P)2012 BN Publishing

Sci Fi take on McCarthyism and the Red Scare

This tidy little science fiction tale of a paranoid passenger to a frontier planet, and his secret manipulation of voice recordings is really a satire of McCarthyism and the fear it spread in the early 1950's, where to be merely accused of being a communist was to be condemned, losing one's job and social status overnight. The author, Theodore Sturgeon, was a great champion of humanity, always promoting kindness, caring, and selfless love in his work. The style is necessarily dated, given the style of broadcast radio at the time, but the story still resonate today, with a warning to beware the seduction of the power of the majority against the mavericks of society.