Leviathan 99
par Ray Bradbury
Leviathan 99 is a science-fiction radio drama by Ray Bradbury, set aboard a deep-space vessel on a voyage toward Mars. Its crew travels through a vast and unsettling cosmos, where the mission’s commander, Captain Jonathan Hart, is driven by a consuming desire to destroy the great white space whale he believes is responsible for his blindness.
Bradbury reimagines the pursuit at the heart of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as an audio journey among the stars. The story combines the rhythms of a sea voyage with the strangeness of interplanetary travel, using the crew’s encounters and the captain’s obsession to build a world of danger, wonder, and mounting tension.
The result is a dramatic, literary adventure that pairs cosmic scale with an intimate portrait of fixation and revenge. Its poetic language and eerie science-fiction atmosphere make the voyage as much a psychological descent as a journey through space.
This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.