A world beyond

Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first heard on Radio Four aeons ago, back in the era of flares and hippie hair.

Science fiction has never been the same since Douglas Adams so brilliantly lampooned the genre in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first heard on Radio Four aeons ago, back in the era of flares and hippie hair. Once again, though, the sound of robots clanking through the studio can be heard on virtually all the BBC’s wireless networks in a season of dramas inspired and written by some of the greats — H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard, Iain M. Banks, Arthur C. Clarke.

There’s been a special affinity between radio and sci-fi since the experiments of Tesla, Marconi and Popov conjured up voices from what seemed like another, hidden dimension of existence. When Orson Welles terrified America with his purposeful adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in 1938 he was tapping into the power of the medium; the way it stimulates and takes over the imagination, rather than sedating it. Listening can create such powerful thoughts inside the head that you lose all consciousness of what’s really going on at the prosaic level of reality and can believe yourself to be wherever your mind has taken you. Post-Hitchhiker, though, can sci-fi’s pretensions to higher philosophical truths about our existence ever be taken seriously?

Thursday’s afternoon play on Radio Four was a very short dramatisation of an Iain M. Banks novel, The State of the Art. The spaceship Arbitrary has arrived in the earth’s orbit from its utopian galaxy, Culture, in which evil has been banished by a higher consciousness, and has sent its agents, Dervley Linter and Diziet Sma, to investigate.