The Zombie Astronaut has just posted up two adaptations of the same script. And though they the script is flawed, audio drama fans shouldn’t pass-up this opportunity to listen to two dramatizations of an iconic story, let alone one with an identical script. Compare and contrast:
Cold Equation was adapted for both NBC’s X-Minus One and WMUK’s Future Tense (based on the short story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin). The story was first published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. The script for both productions was by George Lefferts. He not only fundamentally changed one of the characters (perhaps in a bid to make an unpalatable idea less so), he also changed the name of the radio drama, dropping the “s” from the original story’s title. Both these decisions make the drama less powerful than it should be. The ideas presented in The Cold Equations are supposed to be hard, are supposed to be frustrating. The removal of the “s” from the title also ignores the brutal truth that there is more than one kind of calculation going on in this story. This tale is not just a physics lesson, it is also a philosophical treatise…
What’s one little rule?
H amount of fuel will power a ship with a mass M safely to its destination.
H amount of fuel will not power a ship with a mass of M plus X safely to its destination.
She was 5’2 with brown curly hair and her name was X in an equation that would have to be balanced.
WNBC X-Minus One |MP3| August 25th 1955
WMUK Special Projects Future Tense |MP3| June 22nd 1973
