SF 68

, a short-lived series from—appropriately enough—1968, originated in South Africa and was produced and directed by the dean of radio drama in that country, Michael McCabe. SF 68 featured stories from established science fiction writers, drawing inspiration from the likes of Bradbury, Ellison, and Leinster. Most of the copies which have reached North America are somewhat scratchy and garbled (at least the ones I've been able to hear), which is unfortunate, since the shows were well made and the stories interesting. The series was dropped in favor of a mystery/horror series called Beyond Midnight, whose run was far more successful. According to Relic Radio, 33 episodes were produced. All episodes of SF 68 are in half-hour format.

Sources used to create my own log and double-check titles, dates and cast members: Relic Radio, and Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Currently this archive contains 19 of 33 plotlines and 18 reviews

Webmaster Recommends:
Castaway, The | Last Rites

Jeff Dickson Recommends:
Grenville's Planet | Space Cow, The

Andover and the Android

A rising young executive is told he will never be promoted to the presidency unless he marries. As a confirmed bachelor he finds this ultimatum offensive, and opts for blackmailing an engineer into creating an illegal, custom-made android instead.

See also: "Marionettes, Inc." (Dimension X and X Minus One), and "Prime Difference" (X Minus One)

Snippet: "Not quite, normal? Just because I love my music and my books. Just because I've yet to meet a woman who can possibly share my interests without cluttering up my life with a lot of nonsense about changing the flat and... having a tribe of messy kids clambering over everything. Stuart, I can't abide women."

Answer, The

Time: 1950s, during the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union rush headlong into testing larger and more powerful nuclear weapons in a sort of mania far out of proportion to the goals they wish to achieve. Voices cry out in protest, but they are too late. Or are they?

Snippet: "Well gentlemen, there in the lonely ocean is the target, on the horizon. That island was created by volcanic cataclysm millions of years ago. Today it is destined to vanish off the face of the sea. Somewhere, a hundred thousand feet above us, a B-111 is closing in. The big bomb will fall, and a-'poof'."

Bliss of Solitude, The    *LOST*

Breaking Strain    *LOST*

Not sure if this is the Arthur C. Clarke story or not.

Cage, The

The space exploration vessel Lode Star, crash lands on a distant world far from the space lanes. Several years later, the survivors are 'rescued' by aliens who think they are indigenous animals. The humans struggle to convince their wholly-alien captors that they are rational beings and don't deserve to be kept in cages. Not an easy thing to do when they don't speak the aliens' language!

Versions were produced for Mindwebs and SF 68.

Snippet: "I thought you'd realized. They think we're animals. They don't consider us intelligent."

Castaway, The

When an alien lands in a remote rural area, the local yokels decide the best way to get interstellar relations off on the right foot is to hunt it down and kill it. The alien expresses its desire for peace and friendship... but everybody knows you can't trust aliens.

See also: "First Contact" (Dimension X, Exploring Tomorrow, X Minus One)

Snippet: My scalp crawls at the thought of you sittin' there and talking to me and you're NOT a man, but I'll be sorry for you... even while I try and kill you.

Chronoclasm    *LOST*

Cold Equations, The    *LOST*

Not sure if this is the Tom Godwin story or not.

Death Dust, The

A crew of three astronauts, aboard the spaceship Supernova, are the first humans to travel to the moon and back: Major Dick Rivero (co-pilot and astrogator), Dr Charles Perris (medical and human-factors specialist), and Major James Casey (the aircraft commander).

The NASA website contains detailed information about the history of the space program, including many photographs and fantastic interviews with some of the astronauts: The First Lunar Landing: As Told by the Astronauts and Apollo Expeditions to the Moon. It is very interesting to compare the thoughts of the astronauts in this episode with those of the real astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Note: as of Jan 2017, 7 of the 12 Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon are still alive; they are all over 80 years old.--- webmaster

Snippet: The moon. Men through all ages had looked at the moon, marvelled at the cold, virginal beauty of the moon, wondered what was on the moon, in the moon, and we were coming down on the moon. Down in one corner of a flat area which the astronomers call Mare Imbrium. It looked like a mud flat after a bunch of kids had tossed a load of junk into it. There were [streams] of tiny holes such as water droplets would make, there were cozy [caps] like the imprints of pebbles. And there were wide pie-crust craters. The whole area was baked hard and white.

End of Summer, The    *LOST*

Escape Mechanism    *LOST*

Eye of the Beholder    *LOST*

From up There    *LOST*

Grenville's Planet

Two galactic explorers from Mapping Command stumble across a one-in-a-million rarity: a world covered by ocean. A closer examination reveals a pair of enigmatic islands where strange events begin to occur... and inexplicably, there appear to be mammals living on one of the islands even though tidal floods would surely have destroyed any sea-based organisms before evolving into land-based forms.

See also: "The Silver Sky" (BBC).

Snippet: Wisha didn't see the brightness because he was back aft, alone. He sat quietly, relaxed, He wasn't bored. It was just that he had no interest. After 14 years in the Mapping Command, even the strangest of the new worlds was routine to him. What little imagination he had was beginning to center upon a small farm he had seen on the southern plains of Vega 5. The brightness that Wisha didn't see, grew with the passing moments. A pale young man named Grenville, who was Wisha's crew man, watched it for a long while, absently. When the glean took on brilliance of the blue-white dazzling-blaze, Grenville started. He stared at the screen for a long moment, then carefully checked the distance. Still a few light minutes away, the planet was already uncommonly bright. A blueness and the brightness flowed in together. It was the most beautiful thing Grenville had ever seen.

Homecoming

A man awakes after a terrible accident with a strange sort of amnesia. He is inside a vehicle, with a woman beside him. With her aid, he slowly begins to remember details: his name is Sam Bishop; she is his wife, Neena; he has been in the hospital; they are returning home—to the house where he was born and which they now share, a house in a town called Greenville; he has lost his legs; he is 34, she 27; he's an only child, both his parents are dead. He tries to rebuild his life, but things seem odd. He tries to get his old job back at the factory, but the job has already been filled. He tries to buy an automobile to leave Greenville, but he is told it is against the law because of his artificial legs. Gradually he suspects there is more going on than he is allowed to learn. Is he in a prison? An asylum? Memories slowly awaken... a mystery is revealed... and then resolved.

I'm Sam... that's my name... not Bishop... not Bishop... my name's Sam Pounce. I never saw Greenville in my life before. Never! ... [a quick trip to one] star... [?] Colonel Sam Pounce. I went to... seek... to seek a fortune... [?] lost in space... I got back... I got back to Earth... where I am now, Earth... [?] a prisoner... why am I a prisoner? I couldn't help failing my mission... I couldn't help failing... I was the first... there are always failures... always...

Jenny with Wings

A young woman who was born with wings, finds herself an outcast -- protected by her father but alienated from the rest of humanity. When her father dies and she stares into the bleak future, she despairs... until love smiles back. Or is that a sadistic grin?

"...sometimes I wish I was just like all the others."

Last Rites

A Catholic priest answers the desperate summons of a dying and lifelong friend (George) who has a seemingly impossible secret he must reveal before the end comes. The end is near; his need is urgent; the priest is skeptical.

Snippet: "You know my views on this subject. Even if they could create a creature like this, I still say they'll never create a machine that's capable of abstract thought. Human intelligence is a spiritual thing, and it can't be duplicated by man." --- the priest

New Wine, The

Harve and Helen spend a quiet spring afternoon together before parting: Harve to travel on an 8-year interstellar mission (returning 100 years hence, due to relativistic effects) and Helen to stay on Earth and pursue her own experiments. When the interstellar mission returns, the crew find the Earth oddly depopulated and wonder about Helen's experiments.

Snippet: "There will be no wives for you in the world of 2129." --- Helen

Outcasts, The    *LOST*

Quest

In a future Megalopolis run by machines, Harry Johnson (a man) searches for the meaning of life. When he discovers that his therapist is an android, his feelings of alienation intensify and drive him to search for something that will ground him to reality... something—anything—that has not been made by either man or machine.

Snippet: "Harry Johnson walked the city streets. Was Johnson expecting to see a tree? Or a flower bed? Ridiculous thought. Such things belonged in the mists of the shadowy past, the ugly past. But Johnson tried. He had set out upon a Quest."

Requiem    *LOST*

Not sure if this is the Robert Heinlein story or not.

Risk Profession, The    *LOST*

Routine Exercise

The crew of the nuclear submarine Torus, on a routine training exercise, experience some odd phenomena which suggest they may have travelled millions of years into the past. But if so, what is tracking them on sonar... and why is it closing in so fast?

Snippet: Tell the truth Captain. Two men's lives have been lost under peculiar circumstances during a routine exercise. And your vessel returns to base with the following deficiencies: in brief, a large quantity of ammunition, two torpedoes and, er... two hump-class missiles both with atomic warheads.

Sands of Time, The    *LOST*

Sound of Thunder, A

Time Safari, Inc. offers time safaris to any year in the past. They guarantee you a crack at the most dangerous game that ever walked the Earth, but they don't guarantee you'll come back alive. But that's the allure of the hunt, isn't it? The thrill that comes from pursuing an animal that could easily kill you while you're busy killing it. From the year 2055, three hunting enthusiasts (Eckels, Billings, and Kramer) and two guides (Travis and Lesperance) head back to the Cretaceous, more than 60 million years in the past, for the chance of a lifetime: an opportunity to bag a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

See also: "A Gun for Dinosaur" and "Project Mastodon" (both from X Minus One)

Snippet: "We don't want anyone going who will panic at the first shot. Six safari leaders were killed last year and a dozen hunters."

Space Cow, The

Dr Meltzer, a small-time country doctor and veterinarian living in a rural area of Mars, is called to the space-port in response to an unusual emergency: a ship has returned from Ganymede bearing a leviathan no one has ever seen before. The animal measures 300 feet long and looks a bit like a Pershing dragon with a 30' wide mouth. And it's sick. The authorities want the doctor to don a spacesuit and enter the space cow's digestive tract to see what's wrong with it. The doctor is not amused.

Snippet: I haven't the slightest idea what the thing's like. How am I supposed to know what's wrong with it? How can I treat it?

Survival

A spacecraft en route to Mars suffers a catastrophic malfunction. Adrift in space and with no communications grim decisions must be made. When a rescue party finally arrives they don’t find what they where expecting.

Another version of this story aired on Fear on 4.

Time to Rest    *LOST*

Voice in the Earphones    *LOST*

Wanted in Surgery

A surgeon in the future resents the robotization of medicine, and resolves to take drastic action.

Watchbird

Scientists have discovered that murderers' brain waves, just before they commit murder, are slightly different from normal brainwaves and that these differences can be measured. Corporate engineers use this knowledge to design flying machines that soar above the city and monitor the brainwaves of every person walking the streets; when abnormal brainwaves are detected the watchbirds sweep into action. Unfortunately, not all murderers exhibit these brainwaves... so the final watchbird design includes learning circuits which allow the watchbirds to expand their definition of murder...

Versions were produced for 2000x, SF 68 and Tales of Tomorrow.

Snippet: "A simple, reliable answer to civilization's greatest problem, all wrapped and packaged in a pound of incorruptible metal, crystal, and plastic."

Will, The

Yellow Pill, The    *LOST*

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