Solaris is the new classic serial starting this afternoon on Radio 4 (on FM only, with cricket on long wave). Set on a remote orbiting space station, it is the first radio adaptation of a novel written by the Polish author Stanislaw Lem in 1961. This is best known for the two film versions – Andrei Tarkovsky’s art-house original of 1972 and the slicker Hollywood remake with George Clooney in 2002 – but today’s landing on radio reminds us of sci-fi’s key role in wireless history.

The most famous radio programme ever made, The War of the Worlds, in 1938, was, of course, a sci-fi drama, even if thousands of Americans genuinely believed that they were listening to a Martian invasion; in Britain, the last evening radio show to attract a bigger audience than that watching television at the same time was also a sci-fi drama, Journey into Space, in the 1950s.

Much more cryptic than these adventures, Lem’s story offers strange presences and psychic phantasms, not bug-eyed aliens. It is enigmatic, moody and haunting. Polly Thomas’s two-part production starts so languorously that some people will feel the title should be not Solaris, but Slowaris: like so much radio drama, it takes a while to become clear, but is then hard to turn off. The hypnotic, meditative music, composed by Alice Trueman, is outstanding.

These days, sci-fi is rarely broadcast on Radio 4 (Solaris slipped through because of its literary status as serious existential drama). Instead, it is confined to its digital offspring, BBC7. There, at 6pm, seven nights a week, is an hour-long slot called 7th Dimension, dedicated to the gamut of things sci-fi and strange. It is one of the richest enclaves on radio. This week, for example, sees the start of Susan Hill’s celebrated ghost story (and West End hit) The Woman in Black; the end of Aliens in the Mind, a thriller starring Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, first aired on Radio 4 in 1977; and the continuation of C S Lewis’s Perelandra, first aired on BBC7 in 2005 – and how enjoyable, and rare, to hear a single voice (Alex Jennings) read uninterrupted for an entire half-hour.

Science fact, as opposed to fiction, is more variable. True, Radio 4 broadcasts All in the Mind (psychiatry), Thinking Allowed (sociology), Check Up, returning on Thursday (medicine), Home Planet (ecology), The Material World and Leading Edge (engineering and general research), and so on. But there is precious little on the other networks – none on Radio 3, for example, which once took its audience on regular outings to the frontiers of knowledge in a series called Spectrum – and precious little regular coverage of the ethical issues that swirl around so much contemporary scientific activity in, for example, vivisection, cloning, weaponry and sterilisation. There is an internal debate at the BBC as to whether global warming should be presented as opinion or fact, and that too should be debated.

By far the best forum for scientific discussion is Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. You hardly ever know in advance what he and his boffins are going to discuss, and it is as likely to be Rousseau as rubidium. All the same, many listeners will be looking forward to the return of this weekly mental challenge on September 27.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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