CBSRMT had a difficult relationship with science fiction. The show managed some excellent individual programs within the genre (generally written either by Henry Slesar or Alfred Bester--both pros in the field--or else adaptations of old classics), but the vast majority were pretty abysmal. Most of the writers had no background in the genre and little apparent knowledge of it--which accounts for the numerous episodes that are little more than thinly-disguised rewrites of PLANET OF THE APES, LOGAN'S RUN, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, various STAR TREK and TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, and the two SF literary classics that even non-SF people can be counted on to have read, BRAVE NEW WORLD and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

"The God Machine" falls into that last category. The very notion of computer-as-God had been done to death by 1980 (it's even in STAR TREK); to this, the episode adds a future in which people can't choose their own mates, where love has been forgotten/outlawed, and where rebels risk permanent mental "readjustment" (just as happens to Winston Smith at the end of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR). One could see all of these themes in pretty much any sci-fi TV show of the 1960s or '70s (or in the pulp magazines of the '30s and '40s).

As a result, "The God Machine" is a weak, almost painfully derivative story; Sam Dann seems to have phoned this one in while watching too many bad sci-fi TV reruns.

For a counter-example of how well RMT could do science fiction, I'd like to recommend Alfred Bester's "The Walking Dead" (5/20/76), a brilliant tale of a psychopathic robot adapted from his classic short story "Fondly Fahrenheit." Science fiction radio rarely got better than this!