Earthsearch: A Ten-Part Adventure Serial in Time and Space is a BBC Radio 4 science fiction series written by James Follett, comprising ten half-hour episodes broadcast between January and March 1981. There is also a novelisation by Follett under the same title. The series has been released on cassette and has been rerun several times on BBC 7 beginning in 2003.

Cast

• Commander Telson - Sean Arnold
• Sharna - Amanda Murray
• Darv - Haydn Wood
• Astra - Kathryn Hurlbutt
• Angel One - Sonia Fraser
• Angel Two - Gordon Reid

Episodes

1. Planetfall
2. First Footprint City
3. Sands of Kyros
4. The Solaraic Empire
5. The Pools of Time
6. Across the Abyss
7. New Blood
8. Marooned
9. Star Cluster: Tersus Nine
10. Earthfall

Story

Some years before the story opens, the huge Earth starship Challenger, on a mission to find Earth-like planets for colonization, encountered a meteoroid shower that killed all of the adult crew and seriously damaged the ship. The only human survivors were four babies - two boys, Telson and Darv, and two girls, Sharna and Astra.

The four have been raised from childhood by androids and tutored by two disembodied voices called Angel One and Angel Two. Most of the humans believe the voices are real angels, but Darv is more suspicious and believes they are actually computers.

Darv is correct. The Angels are the Challenger's ancillary control computers. Due to a fault in their design they have become megalomaniac and want to return to Earth and rule it. It was they who deliberately manouevred the Challenger into the path of the meteoroids and shut off the ship's defences. Unfortunately for them, they underestimated the amount of damage that would result, not only to the ship but themselves. As a result they have lost an unknown amount of potentially vital information about the nature of space and time.

They are also having difficulties with the human crew, despite retarding the onset of puberty with drugs in order to keep them sexually ignorant. Telson, now commander, and Sharna are compliant, but Darv is headstrong and independent and is beginning to win Astra over.

When the Challenger arrives in Earth's solar system, the crew and the Angels are equally surprised to discover that the Earth has vanished, leaving the moon behind. The irony is that the Angels now need Darv's rebellious mind to try and figure out where Earth has gone, otherwise they will have no planet to rule.

The rest of the series deals with the crew's attempts to solve the mystery, encountering various humans and computers, hostile and otherwise, on their travels, while attempting to throw off the Angels' control over them once and for all.

In the final episode the crew leave the Challenger to settle on a new planet which they call Paradise - actually our Earth, millions of years in the past.

The story is continued in Earthsearch II.

The series is notable for not violating the known laws of physics by introducing faster than light travel. Instead the crew must enter suspended animation while the ship is travelling. The crew's ignorance of the time dilation effect caused by relativity is a major plot point.

Trivia

Most of the regular cast had cameo roles (sometimes playing more than one character) in BBC Radio's 1981 production of The Lord of the Rings, possibly because they simply happened to be in the studio while the Tolkien adaptation was being cast.