Exploring Tomorrow was a latter-day half-hour science fiction program heard on Mutual from December 4, 1957 to June 13, 1958, just as the program X Minus One was wrapping up at NBC. Like X Minus One's predecesor, Dimension X, it was affiliated with the magazine Astounding Science Fiction; unlike Dimension X, it featured active collaboration with the magazine as editor John W. Campbell hosted every episode (which he'd previously done for the short-lived Beyond Tomorrow)!
Exploring Tomorrow has two faults; radio being what it was at the time, it's a very truncated series (episodes tend to run about 15-18 minutes) so the drama is sped through very quickly. The other is the aforementioned Campbell. He considered himself the gatekeeper of science fiction, the tastemaker of the genre, but the man had no talent for dramatics. His unprofessional murmured introductions and outros (while "As Time Goes By" played in the background) really bring down Exploring Tomorrow; as an east coast Mutual program, the actual performances came from the same sort of east coast talent heard on shows like the Mysterious Traveler such as Larry Haines, Mason Adams, Maurice Tarplin, and Lawson Zerbe.
Stories on Exploring Tomorrow came from Astounding and included authors like Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Gordon Dickson, Philip K. Dick, Murray Leinster and Poul Anderson. Unlike X Minus One, there were no original stories.
X Minus One often had a very whimsical tone, particularly in its stories adapted from Robert Sheckley and the original scripts by Ernest Kinoy. Exploring Tomorrow, being so closely associated with Campbell, had that same Campbellian starchiness. There's precious little light-hearted content - Exploring Tomorrow took itself very seriously. There were even some barbed references to inhuman aliens called "Kinoys" in the episode "The Decision!" Campbell was unkind to people he saw as "outsiders" to the genre (such as Kinoy) dabbling in science fiction and all evidence suggests the majority of science fiction prose writers of the 50s were likewise very hostile towards radio and television people writing in the genre. Note the advertisement above, from an issue of Astounding, with its contempt towards "1930s style BEM's and ray-guns-cum-spaceships!"
Of interest is that Exploring Tomorrow featured its own adaptation of Tom Godwin's "Cold Equations," which did, after all, originate in Astounding. It's a very good adaptation, although I prefer the performances in the X Minus One version.
The first time I heard Exploring Tomorrow it was presented on my local radio station (QR77) as an episode of X Minus One, even though it still had Campbell's mumbled speeches (I didn't know what to make of Campbell's intro and outro - I assumed it was some disc jockey who talked over the original X Minus One intro and outro). The episode was "The Convict" and I wondered then why it sounded so unlike every other X Minus One I'd heard! On the other hand, "The First Men on the Moon" (January 22, 1958) featured a rocket blast that reused the introduction heard on X Minus One! Someone in the sound booth was having fun.
I do like the episode "The Mimic" (by Robert Silverberg) about an extraterrestrial who absorbs other people into its collective - it's a pretty good horror story.
Exploring Tomorrow's brief radio run had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the diminishing stature of radio drama; when Mutual cancelled the series, it was nothing personal - they were also cancelling the entirety of their dramatic fare on radio!
You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers' collection of Exploring Tomorrow episodes with the YouTube playlist below:
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