FIRST CONTACT: Two Ships Meet In The Crab Nebula, And Neither Can Go Home | #MidnightInTheMacabre

Four thousand light-years from Earth, a survey ship deep inside the Crab Nebula picks up something on its locator that no human built, and within the hour both crews understand the same thing: whichever ship leaves first can be followed home, so neither one can be allowed to leave.

A NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR: I’ve been on an old-time radio kick recently, listening to shows like “The Whistler”, “Dimension X”, and “Strange Tales”. One of my favorite shows is called “X-Minus One”.  It was a half-hour science fiction radio drama series that was broadcast from April 24, 1955 to January 9, 1958 in various timeslots on NBC radio. At the end of each episode they tell you where the stories they used came from before they adapted them for radio – and one of those sources was the publication “Astounding Science Fiction Magazine”. I jumped online to see if there were old copies I could look at, and I found a book – an anthology of many of the stories from that magazine. The book was published in 1954. The story was entitled “First Contact”, written by Murray Leinster in 1945. The story is credited as one of the first instances of a universal translator in science fiction. So influential is the story that it won a retro Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1996.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-firstcontact

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“First Contact” by Murray Leister from “Astounding S-F Anthology”: https://amzn.to/3zhbBWi

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Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 13, 2026

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