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David Gerrold
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David Gerrold, born Jerrold David Friedman (24 January 1944, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one chosen by Star Trek was filmed as "The Trouble with Tribbles" and became one of the most popular episodes of the original series.
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David Gerrold, born Jerrold David Friedman (24 January 1944, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one chosen by Star Trek was filmed as "The Trouble with Tribbles" and became one of the most popular episodes of the original series. Gerrold's novelette The Martian Child won both Hugo and Nebula awards.
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Original Series
Within days of seeing the Star Trek series premiere "The Man Trap" on 8 September 1966, Gerrold wrote a sixty-page outline for a two-part episode called "Tomorrow Was Yesterday", about the Enterprise discovering a generation ship launched from Earth centuries earlier. Although Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon rejected the outline, he realized Gerrold was talented and expressed interest in him submitting some story premises. Bearing preliminary titles and, in some cases, preliminary character names, Gerrold submitted five premises.
Two that he had little recollection of involved a spaceship-destroying machine, eerily similar to Norman Spinrad's "The Doomsday Machine", and a situation in which Kirk had to play a chess game with an advanced intelligence using his crew as chess pieces. There has been some speculation by Trek and comic book historians that the chess game was inspired by an early issue of Justice League of America, published by DC Comics. The issue in question had the evil alien conqueror, Despero, playing a game of chess with one of the Leaguers, with the pieces depicting the other heroes. Gerrold has denied this, but the speculation persists. As a similar idea had been used in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel The Chessmen of Mars, about a game of "living chess", it is hardly an entirely new idea in any case.
A third premise, "Bandi", involved a small being running about the Enterprise as someone's pet, and which empathically sways the crew's feelings and emotions to comfort Bandi, and if necessary at someone else's expense. Gerrold noted, in retrospect, that it would not be like the Enterprise crew to have such attitudes against Kirk as Bandi induced, and that he might instead set the episode on another ship where laxity has been reported.
A fourth premise, "The Protracted Man", applied science fiction to use an effect seen in West Side Story, when Maria twirls in her dancing dress and the colours separate. Gerrold's story involved a man transported from a shuttlecraft trying out a new space warp technology. The man is no longer unified, separating into three visible forms when he moves, separated by a fraction of a second. As efforts are undertaken to correct the condition and move the Enterprise to where corrective action can be taken, the protraction worsens. According to Gerrold, while they liked this idea, it was deemed too expensive in regards to the special effects required.
The fifth premise, "The Fuzzies," was also initially rejected by Coon, but a while later he changed his mind and called Gerrold's agent to accept it. Gerrold then expanded the story to a full television story outline entitled "A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me. . .," and it eventually became "The Trouble With Tribbles." The name "Fuzzy" was changed because H. Beam Piper had written novels about a fictional alien species of the same name (see Little Fuzzy). The script went through numerous rewrites, including, at the insistence of Gerrold's agent, being re-set in a stock frontier town instead of an "expensive" space station. Gerrold later wrote a book, The Trouble With Tribbles, telling the whole story about producing the episode and his earlier premises. The concept of Tribbles was considered similar enough to the Flat cats of Robert Heinlein's novel The Rolling Stones that legal permission was obtained from Robert Heinlein.
This was one of two books Gerrold wrote about Star Trek in the early 1970s after the original series had been canceled. His other was a comprehensive analysis of the series entitled The World of Star Trek. He discussed them at various conventions where he was a frequent speaker and guest. In The World of Star Trek, he criticized some of the elements of the show, particularly Kirk's habit of placing himself in dangerous situations and leading landing parties from the ship himself, and suggested some things he would change about the show if it were to air again. Among these were a Klingon as a member of the crew, a counselor to look after crewmembers' inner lives, and crewmembers allowed to bring their families and children along.
Star Trek: The Animated Series
Gerrold contributed two stories for the Emmy Award winning Star Trek: The Animated Series which ran from 1973 to 1974: "More Tribbles, More Troubles" and "Bem." Bem featured the first use of James T. Kirk's middle name: Tiberius.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
All of the above noted changes were incorporated into Star Trek: The Next Generation when it debuted in 1987. In particular, Gerrold can be credited for reshaping the position of "first officer" as the ship's executive officer and commander of "away teams" (to overcome the unrealism of the ship's captain routinely beaming into dangerous situations). He parted company with the producers at the beginning of the first season, after a dispute before the Writers' Guild in which the Guild required that Gerrold be paid additional wages for the work he did helping to create the series, because he had largely written the show's bible rather than the ailing Gene Roddenberry. He was awarded cash but chose to forego additional credit.
Roddenberry's partisans struck back after his death in 1991, with a lengthy passage in David Alexander's authorized biography, Star Trek Creator, suggesting that Gerrold had plagiarized the Martian Flat cat chapter in Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Rolling Stones for "The Trouble With Tribbles," (something that Gerrold had categorically denied in his book on the episode, saying he thought he was writing the "rabbits in Australia" story) and that only Heinlein's age and old-school graciousness had prevented him from bringing a lawsuit.
In fact, Heinlein and Gerrold became friends in the late 1970s, when Gerrold was an active blood donor in support of Heinlein's blood drives. They remained friends for many years, and Gerrold even dedicated one of his books (A Matter For Men) to Robert and Virginia Heinlein. After Heinlein's death, Ginny Heinlein gave up her California home, and Gerrold adopted Heinlein's cat, Pixel.
Another point of contention between Gerrold and the Star Trek: The Next Generation executive leadership was Gerrold's writing of an unproduced script that would have had an allegory to the AIDS pandemic along with some brief scenes with two Star Fleet crewmembers that would have subtly been identified as being a gay couple. Gerrold wrote this script in response to being with Roddenberry at a convention in 1987 where he had promised that the upcoming Next Generation series would deal with the issue of sexual orientation in the egalitarian future. The script was rewritten to remove the gay couple, and even then certain people seemed to be worried about airing an episode that made a plea for compassion for those people infected with AIDS. For more information see LGBT characters in the Star Trek universe. This script was later, after substantial rewriting, made a part of Gerrold's Star Wolf planned TV series, and was novelized as a Star Wolf story:Blood and Fire (see below)
Post-Trek involvement
Gerrold wrote a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "Blood and Fire", which included an AIDS metaphor and an incidentally gay couple in the ship's crew. The script was purchased by the TNG producers, but eventually shelved. Gerrold eventually reworked it as a novel, Blood and Fire, the third book in the Star Wolf series (see below). He later contributed the script to Star Trek: New Voyages, where the script was reworked by staff writer Carlos Pedraza to place the story in the time frame of Star Trek: The Original Series, and to introduce a gay couple on the Enterprise. Gerrold went on to direct the New Voyages episode in 2007.
Gerrold had always wanted to appear onscreen in an episode of Star Trek, particularly "The Trouble with Tribbles". The character of Ensign Freeman, who appears in the famous bar scene with the Klingons, was originally intended by Gerrold to be a walk-on part for himself, although another actor eventually took the role. While Gerrold appeared as a crewman extra with other Trek fandom notables in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he did not get the chance to appear in a Trek series until Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, when he appeared as a security guard in "Trials and Tribble-ations", set during the very same time frame as his original episode.
Gerrold also published a novelization of the Star Trek: The Next Generation series premiere "Encounter at Farpoint" (1987) and an original Star Trek novel entitled The Galactic Whirlpool (1980) based on the story outline "Tomorrow Was Yesterday" (it has been suggested that the "Specs" character in that novel was Gerrold himself). In 2006, for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, he co-edited with Robert J. Sawyer an essay collection Boarding the Enterprise.
Other television work
After his early success with "The Trouble with Tribbles" Gerrold continued writing television scripts (mostly for science fiction series such as Land of the Lost, Babylon 5, Sliders, and The Twilight Zone).
Early science fiction novels
His science fiction novels, of which the best known are The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), about a man whose experiments with a time machine distorts the details of his life and reality, and When HARLIE Was One (1972), the story of an artificial intelligence's relationship with his creators. When HARLIE Was One was nominated for best novel for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. A revised edition, entitled When HARLIE Was One, Release 2.0, was published in 1988, incorporating new insights and reflecting new developments in computer science.
The War Against the Chtorr
Gerrold is the author of the War Against the Chtorr series of books, about an invasion of Earth by mysterious aliens: A Matter for Men (1983), A Day for Damnation (1985), A Rage for Revenge (1989), and A Season for Slaughter (1993). As of 2006, he was still writing the fifth book (A Method For Madness), and has contracted to write a sixth (A Time For Treason). The ending chapters of the series have been set aside for the seventh and final book, which will be A Case For Courage. As of 2007, he says he is only four sequences away from completing book five. Long time fans of the series note that Gerrold has been promising on his website to complete book five for more than a decade. If one scans the Web there are still pages which claim Book 5 will be "due out next October", or "soon", and "nearing completion" dating back to the mid-to-late 1990s. This has become a bone of contention with some fans, yet the signs suggest that Chtorr 5 may be close to completion and publication. The first two books exist in both "original" and "extended" versions.
(Gerrold recently took time off to direct "Blood And Fire", a feature-length episode of Star Trek: New Voyages. He rewrote the script, compiled the shooting schedule, and worked for two weeks of 14 hour days without a break. Under Gerrold's direction, the production team completed all 95 pages in 12 days, thus putting the lie to persistent rumors that Gerrold's age and health might be limiting factors in his writing.)
There was also at one time a Chtorr movie site, and rumblings about the series being made into a movie. Whether that fell by the wayside, or if the rights were purchased and then shelved, is unknown.
In an original twist, the invasion is an ecological one. Instead of earthlings Terraforming another planet, the aliens are "Chtorraforming" Earth. Instead of armies, the unseen aggressors gradually unleash plants and animals from their older, more evolved planet (which is indicated as being perhaps a half billion years older than Earth, and evolved into a higher effective competitiveness). These outcompete and displace their terrestrial counterparts and Earth becomes more and more Chtorr-like as the "war" progresses. With each book, additional layers, features, creatures, details and characteristics are exposed, creating a rich alien universe and continuing tension as the antagonist relentlessly adapts faster and more successfully than the heroes. The Chtorran ecology created by Gerrold is so complex there was at one time rumored to be a "Red Book" in the works - an illustrated field guide to Chtorran wildlife. Fan blogs sometimes generate detailed and sometimes wild speculation as to where Gerrold is headed with the story, but the stories themselves seldom dissappoint.
The feel of the novels is very "Heinleinesque", and one perception of the books is to look at them as an entire life-cycle of a Heinlein Character, a unique sort of character usually central in all of Heinlein's novels, with a recognizable set of key personality characteristics (common sense, intelligence, fiercely independent, and highly competent), albeit at differing ages, sexes, and experience levels. Sometimes the character plays different parts, as both central character and older, wiser mentor. One possible reason that Gerrold is holding off on the later books is that he intends to write them from the central perspective of the oldest Heinlein character, older than Gerrold has been prior to around 2005. One reason given by Gerrold for the length of time taken between books 4 and 5 is the need to develop a writing style called "first person psychotic". Indications are that the central character attempts to survive by adaptation without being absorbed by the alien ecology, descends into his own personal version of living hell, or both. Although the books are not particularly full of gore, Gerrold's writing is so impactful that some fans warn readers the books are 'not for the squeamish.'
Another characteristic of the series is that, in the first book, the main characters' Jewish heritage is relegated to one throwaway sentence, similar to Heinlein's tendency to throw in a similar comment about the race or national origin of his central character.
The series also shares a number of stylistic similarities to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, with substantial didactic portions akin to Starship Troopers' "History and Moral Philosophy" coursework discussions between the central character and a mentor (one of the key differences between the original and extended versions is these discussions are edited down somewhat in the original versions).
Elements of the Chtorran story line appear in other of Gerrold's works, such as the Tracker series and the Dingilliad.
Star Wolf
Gerrold is also the author of the Star Wolf series of books, centered on the star ship Star Wolf and its crew: Voyage of the Star Wolf (1990), The Middle of Nowhere (1995), Blood and Fire (2004), and Yesterday's Children (1972) which is actually an earlier novel that features the same main character republished as Starhunt and tacked into the main continuity as a prequel. The books were based on a concept Gerrold had originally planned for a TV series. The Star Wolf series reflects Gerrold's contention that, due to the distances involved, space battles would be more like submarine hunts than the dogfights usually portrayed—in most cases the ships doing battle wouldn't even be able to see each other.
Other works
He also wrote the non-fiction book Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, published in 2001.
The Martian Child is a semi-autobiographical novel, expanded from a novelette of the same name, based on the author's own experiences as a single adoptive parent, with most of the key moments drawn from actual events. The novelette won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and a movie version was released in November 2007, with John Cusack playing the adoptive parent. There is some controversy surrounding this character, as David Gerrold and his character in the novel are both gay, but in the movie he is a straight widower.
In 2000, his long-time admiration of the works of Robert A. Heinlein led him to create a new series, called The Dingilliad. It follows a resourceful teenager and his family as they try to begin a new life. Although not necessarily canon, there are hints that it ties into the War Against the Chtorr universe, with everything from the plagues to the rumored appearance of a giant purple worm. The trilogy consists of Jumping Off The Planet (2000), Bouncing Off the Moon (2001), and Leaping to The Stars (2002). Jumping off the Planet received the 2002 Hal Clement (Young Adult Award) for Excellence in Children's Science Fiction Literature
In 2005, Gerrold was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.
Bibliography
Series
- A Matter for Men (1983)
- A Day for Damnation (1984)
- A Rage for Revenge (1989)
- A Season for Slaughter (1992)
- A Method for Madness (projected)
- A Time for Treason (projected)
- A Case for Courage (projected)
- Yesterday's Children (aka Starhunt) (1972, rv.1980)
- Voyage of the Star Wolf (1990)
- The Middle of Nowhere (1995)
- Blood and Fire (2004)
- Jumping Off the Planet (2000)
- Bouncing Off the Moon (2001)
- Leaping to the Stars (2002)
Trackers
- Under the Eye of God (1993)
- A Covenant of Justice (1994)
Star Trek novels
- The Galactic Whirlpool (1980)
- The Trouble With Tribbles (photonovel) (1977)
- Encounter at Farpoint (1987)
Other novels
Collections
- With a Finger in My I (1972)
- Alternate Gerrolds (2005)
- The Involuntary Human (2007)
Anthologies (editor)
- Protostars (1971) (with Stephen Goldin)
- Generation (1972)
- Science Fiction Emphasis 1 (1974)
- Alternities (1974)
- Ascents of Wonder (1977)
Nonfiction
- The Trouble With Tribbles (1973)
- The World of Star Trek (1973, rv.1984)
- Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (2001)
- Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (2003) (with Glenn Yeffeth)
- Boarding the Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles, and the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek (2006) (with Robert J. Sawyer)
External links
- - designed and maintained by Gerrold and friends
- - Discusses Star Trek Phase II and Star Trek 10
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