Roddenberry's Box

[JarodRussell]

Michael Piller wrote about "Roddenberry's Box", the stuff that he would allow and never allow in Star Trek, as guidelines for writers.

Has Roddenberry ever written down all of these things? And can the mere mortal fan access it?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Has Roddenberry ever written down all of these things? And can the mere mortal fan access it?

You should seek out things like the TNG Writer's Guide, although the Season One "bible" was mostly written by David Gerrold.

David Alexander's official biography on GR probably contains some discussion of Gene's rules for writing Starfleet officers of the 24th century. Maybe also "Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation: A Dialogue With the Creator of Star Trek" by Yvonne Fern.

 

[BillJ]

Michael Piller wrote about "Roddenberry's Box", the stuff that he would allow and never allow in Star Trek, as guidelines for writers.

Has Roddenberry ever written down all of these things? And can the mere mortal fan access it?

Problem is that box shifted quite a bit between Star Trek and The Next Generation.

 

[JarodRussell]

Michael Piller wrote about "Roddenberry's Box", the stuff that he would allow and never allow in Star Trek, as guidelines for writers.

Has Roddenberry ever written down all of these things? And can the mere mortal fan access it?

Problem is that box shifted quite a bit between Star Trek and The Next Generation.

Which is not too bad because there's 100 years between TOS and TNG and we all know how much our world and societies have changed in 100 years.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Problem is that box shifted quite a bit between Star Trek and The Next Generation.

Which is not too bad because there's 100 years between TOS and TNG and we all know how much our world and societies have changed in 100 years.

Except that Roddenberry, by the 80s, came to see the original Star Trek not through the prism of what he did in the sixties but rather through the revisionist prism of what he later decided he wanted to do in the 60s. There was nothing wrong with the box shifting, but applying the box-shift retroactively didn't make any sense, least of all to those trying to work in the 60s box.

 

[David cgc]

I read a copy of the memo that introduced the concept of Synthehol (though I don't believe it used that term), and it mentioned that, since Scotty was a drinker, they'd either have to retcon him as having been having fake booze all that time, or as an aberration by being someone who was willing to put in the effort to get a genuine buzz in the shiny happy future. The memo recommended the latter, thinking Scotty's character was better preserved if he was an eccentric rather than a lush.

 

[BillJ]

Problem is that box shifted quite a bit between Star Trek and The Next Generation.

Which is not too bad because there's 100 years between TOS and TNG and we all know how much our world and societies have changed in 100 years.

Except that Roddenberry, by the 80s, came to see the original Star Trek not through the prism of what he did in the sixties but rather through the revisionist prism of what he later decided he wanted to do in the 60s. There was nothing wrong with the box shifting, but applying the box-shift retroactively didn't make any sense, least of all to those trying to work in the 60s box.

Allyn, thank you for giving a clearer view of what I meant.

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah, the ironic thing is that, while there are so many purist fans who insist on TOS as a holy text that must never be questioned or altered lest we offend the Great Bird of the Galaxy, the fact is that Roddenberry himself never hesitated to retcon his own creation or declare parts of it noncanonical if he wasn't happy with how they turned out.

And really, that's not uncommon among the creators of series fiction. George Lucas gets ragged on for altering the Star Wars movies, but other creators have changed their earlier works when given a chance to revisit them. Arthur C. Clarke rewrote his debut novel, Against the Fall of Night, so radically that it became a whole different novel, The City and the Stars. David Gerrold has rewritten some of his novels, sometimes more than once. Poul Anderson revised some of his early Dominic Flandry stories from the '50s when he collected them in the '70s. And so on. Creators are rarely as defensive of the letter of their works as their fans can be, because creators are more prone to see the flaws.

 

[Greg Cox]

And, as I've mentioned before, Johnston McCully eventually chose to ignore the ending of his original Zorro novel (in which Zorro reveals his true identity to world and retires) so he could keep on writing sequels.

Another example: when I reprinted a bunch of Pauline Ashwell's old sf stories from the fifties, I did some minor tinkering (with Pauline's consent) to make them seem less dated. For example: changing a line about "the senators and their wives" to "the senators and their spouses."

We also revised a scene where a computer fell over and crushed three people!

 

[Therin of Andor]

We also revised a scene where a computer fell over and crushed three people!

You set the scene on "The Land of the Giants"? Someone hit the button on a shrink ray?