Today's exciting time-travel TV tip: Tales of Tomorrow's 'The Window'.

This is a great episode. Bet you never thought the 50s could get 'meta' on you. We recommend all the Tales of Tomorrow episodes on archive.org. It's a nice trip into retro science fiction. Originally, the series aired on Friday nights at 9.30 pm. And no, your Editor did not watch them. Your Editor was born in 1952, and wasn't watching anything back then.

Tales of Tomorrow aired from 1951 to 1953. Television was in its infancy, can you tell? Serious actors appeared on this series, such as Lon Chaney, Jr, Boris Karloff, Brian Keith, even Paul Newman. If you google around on archive.org, you might see some of them before they were famous. The storylines may seem familiar: some are classics, others were later re-used on the Twilight Zone.

If this series looks a little more adult than most TV science fiction outings, it's because the idea was Theodore Sturgeon's. Sturgeon, of course, was a Real Science Fiction Author. Good guy, good stuff.

So swallow your distaste for black and white, and dig into Tales of Tomorrow. You'll be glad you did.

If you're tired of watching TV, why not do some reading? Archive.org has books, too, you know. You can read an old volume of Astounding Science Fiction here. It's missing the Sturgeon and Budris stories, because: they're still under copyright. Here's a Sturgeon tale, though, entitled 'The Martian and the Moron'. Political correctness had not hit science fiction yet. This story is brilliant, and it's based on real fact: in 1924, during the closest approach of Mars to the Earth, everybody – including the US military – was trying to pick up radio signals from the Red Planet. Real tinfoil-hat stuff. What Sturgeon makes of it, though, is sheer magic, thanks to his incredible gift of story-telling.

For more tinfoil-hat stuff, tune in tomorrow.