Actors - David Gerrold

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	Actors - David Gerrold

David Gerrold, born Jerrold David Friedman (January 24, 1944), is an award-winning science fiction author who started his career in 1966 as 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", which has been one of the most enduringly popular episodes of the series.

Early works

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) and science fiction novels, of which the most well-known are The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), about a man who uses a time machine and winds up with a very confused life, including an ongoing party where he is all the guests, and When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (1972), the story of an artificial intelligence's relationship with his creators. H.A.R.L.I.E. was nominated for best novel for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. A revised edition, entitled When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, Release 2.0, was published in 1988, incorporating new insights and reflecting new developments in computer science.

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.

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 wouldn't 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.

The fifth premise, "A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me", was accepted by Coon and 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.

Gerrold subsequently wrote the two books about Star Trek in the early 1970s, after the original series had been canceled but was proving to be wildly popular in syndication, as well as discussing them at 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'd 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 Next Generation

All of the above noted changes were incorporated into Star Trek: The Next Generation when it debuted in 1987, and proved to be popular with viewers. 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 Roddenberry. He was awarded cash but chose to forego additional credit.

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