The Beauty of Science Fiction

The top-rated late-night radio show in the late-nineties was bestowed on Coast-to-Coast AM, a talk show program that centered around paranormal topics and the supernatural. The show’s host was broadcaster and author, Art Bell. Listeners would tune in during long distance commutes, with some positive reviewers exclaiming how much they liked how listening to the show inspired strangely exciting dreams.

Too young to be a fan in the early days, I was a late adopter to the radio program, picking it up two years after the sudden passing of its original host. The few episodes I listened to included a rather puzzling and science fiction element of a man who claimed to have traveled backward in time in order to save the planet from his future timeline. The interview was certainly astonishing as there was an hours long conversation between Art Bell and a person who claimed to be a genuine time traveler.


Twenty-four years after the episode originally aired, a modern podcast decided to track down the person who conducted the original interview and was able to pull back the emerald-green velvet curtain to the reality of the situation. The original interviewee admitted to making up the entire time traveler’s story based on post-apocalyptic books of science fiction. It was claimed that enough interesting topics and keywords were thrown into the mix in order to ensure a bump up to the front of the radio queue. The second part was astonishing. It felt like a first-hand account of a fact-checking article that removed all doubt that the first radio interview (a fan-favorite) was ever a real story.

The beauty of Science Fiction is that it leaves room for a hypothesis or a theoretical outcome to be entertained. Most listeners do not listen to the genre to expose facts and hard evidence, rather to make a conclusion of what could be a logical explanation for certain occurrences.


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