David Gerrold sets aside anger and goes back to work on the Enterprise
New York Times
By any reasonable definition, David Gerrold is a major figure in science fiction. He has published some 50 books and won many of his genre's highest awards, including the Hugo and the Nebula. John Cusack and Amanda Peet starred in Martian Child, which was inspired by his novella The Martian Child and opened in November.
But Gerrold seems destined to be forever remembered as the guy who gave the world the alien race of cute, lovable, rapidly breeding fluff balls known as tribbles.
You know, tribbles — the star characters of The Trouble With Tribbles, probably the most famous episode of the original Star Trek. Initially broadcast 40 years ago (on Dec. 29, 1967), the segment was Gerrold's first professional sale. Most Trekkies love it.
For Gerrold, that's been a mixed blessing.
"I wouldn't call it frustration," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Northridge, Calif. "But I kind of like people to notice that I've done other things. You have a billion people who know Tribbles and only half a million who know my novel The Man Who Folded Himself, which is one of my better-known books."
Tribbles are as much a part of Star Trek lore as Klingons, phasers and the transporter room. One reason is that Gerrold wrote his episode when he was 23 years old and unknown.
His example inspired myriad fans who hoped that they, too, could become part of the show.
Another reason is that Tribbles was the first comic episode of Star Trek. One of the series' best-remembered moments occurs when William Shatner as Captain Kirk is buried in an avalanche of the mewing, puffy title critters (which were actually sealed pouches of synthetic fur stuffed with bits of foam rubber).
"I think the episode worked because it was so coy," Gerrold said.
And yet he has been conflicted about Star Trek since the 1970s, when he appeared at numerous conventions and wrote two nonfiction books about the show, as well as two episodes of the Star Trek animated series (including a Tribbles sequel).
"Doesn't anybody ever want to talk about anything else besides Star Trek?" he complained in a 1978 interview he conducted with himself for Science Fiction Film Classics magazine. "There were 79 episodes of the series; there were 55 different writers. I was only one of them."
He said his disillusion grew when Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator and executive producer, asked him to compose the writers' and directors' guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had its premiere in 1987.
"I wrote the first-draft bible," Gerrold said. "I did a lot of the heavy lifting. And then Gene, because he had to have his name on it, wrote the second guide, which was effectively mine, shortened."
The tension worsened, Gerrold said, when in 1987 he came up with an episode called Blood and Fire, about a deadly disease that he envisioned as an allegory for the AIDS crisis. The script was purchased and then shelved.
Following a series of skirmishes, Gerrold quit the show and sued for his share of earnings from its bible. "Gene, when he rewrote history, said the settlement was $25,000," he said. "I won't say what it was, but the taxes on it were more than that."
Roddenberry died in 1991, and Gerrold was sour on his legacy for years. In 1996, in an afterword to a paperback edition of his friend Harlan Ellison's original Star Trek teleplay, The City on the Edge of Forever, Gerrold wrote: "'Star Trek is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fast food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don't really have to get involved. It's all plastic."
Around that time, though, the producers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine created Trials and Tribble-ations, a sequel that incorporated and enhanced much of the original footage. Gerrold makes a cameo appearance as a red-shirted USS Enterprise crewman in that episode.
At that point, Gerrold says, he decided to change his attitude toward Trek.
"There was a moment — I don't remember when it was — where I finally got bored with being angry and just stopped," he said. Since then he has offered enthusiastic commentary about Star Trek on the Sci Fi Channel and on various DVDs.
Things came full circle this summer when he was in Ticonderoga, N.Y., directing Blood and Fire for the fan-produced Internet-based series Star Trek: New Voyages. Set in the original Star Trek universe, the segment features new actors playing the parts made famous by Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and other members of the original cast. Blood and Fire is scheduled to appear early next year at startreknewvoyages.com.
"It was the most happy, joyous, passionate group of people I'd ever worked with," Gerrold said. "I said: Rule No. 1, let's have fun, and rule No. 2, let's have a great Star Trek movie."
For the record Gerrold is the proud owner of about half a dozen tribbles. And no, they're not breeding.
No comments:
Post a Comment