The World of Star Trek
- Thread starter BillJ
- Start date
Interesting. Somewhere among my stuff I have a first edition I bought when I was eight years old. I'm now 48, so that tells you how long this book has been around.
Gerrold's two books, The World of Star Trek and The Trouble with Tribbles, are both worth reading. He was a founding member of the Cult of Roddenberry and he bought into some of Gene's stories that we now know are false, and Gerrold hated Lost in Space, but apart from that he comes across as an okay guy.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Even though the later version covers the movies, it drops a LOT of good info that was in the original version, and so I still find that one preferable. I really DO like Gerrold's observation in the later version about SFS, that the 'feel' of the film is such that maybe Starfleet is never going to let this crew get together or go into space again. It's just one more reason I wish they'd stayed renegade in the BoP.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Kind of. After SFS I came up with a whole storyline for a sequel that would not only keep them in the BoP, but also get them a free pass in Federation and Romulan space for services rendered. If you decide these movies are about the characters and not about Starfleet, it makes sense to jettison all the expensive baggage of portraying San Francisco and rebuilding the mushroom dock interior another time and instead put that money into some strange new worlds or maybe a few really bizarre character creations.
The whole privateer aspect always has appealed to me, in or out of TREK. When you make your calls while not answering to chain-of-command, you can't claim duty overrides ethics or any of that other crap, you just have to own up to your decisions. And of course Whedon eventually happened onto this notion (although I hate his lack of science) and gave us the wonderful fantastic I-probably-need-to-rewatch-the-series-for-the-umpteenth-time FIREFLY.
Firefly had superb characters, dialog, and FX. Good stories, costumes, and sets. I love it. But the Star Trek movies did not have Joss Whedon.
I'm afraid if they had gone with your renegade scenario, the writers and production designers allocated to Star Trek movies would have delivered something closer in feel to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century than Firefly.
I'm afraid if they had gone with your renegade scenario, the writers and production designers allocated to Star Trek movies would have delivered something closer in feel to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century than Firefly.
Apple iBooks version is $1.99 as well. Description indicates 353 pages (print length) and "more than 50 pages of photos ... and stills from all three movies." Don't know if they're actually included in the download version.
How much of the original text was edited out of the later version?
The Trouble With Tribbles is also $1.99, and Boarding the Enterprise is $4.99. Don't know anything about the latter, any good?
My iBooks copy doesn't contain any of the photos, unfortunately.
I didn't really read the Kindle description, my guess was based on the file size.
It's hard to believe the same man wrote the book about the making of "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "The World of Star Trek." The former is a delight, a well-written, informative and highly enjoyable account of how an average college student came to script one of the series' most beloved episodes. By contrast, "World" comes across as one of the WORST Trek non-fiction books ever written, a petty and overweening critique of the series full of factual errors (including getting the plot details of episodes wrong). It might very well be titled "Every Star Trek episode sucks except the ones done by me and my buddy Harlan Ellison."
You know, it's been over 35 years since I read these books, but that rings a bell. TTwT is still a nice look behind the scenes, as is Joan Winston's chapter in Star Trek Lives (1975), where she visits the set of "The Turnabout Intruder."
Ahhhh, thank you! Thought I was going nuts!
I just got it on my Kindle (for $2.51, marked down from $4.99), and was really loving the apparent celebration of the series in the introduction.
Then Chapter One, "Gene Roddenberry's Dream", starts off with a rundown on the format and an in-depth analysis of the main characters... and then he mentions the "lack of seat belts" issue, and the whole thing devolves into an excrutiatingly-detailed deconstruction of the numerous failings of all involved in the production.
He just rips into the whole design of the Enterprise: From the size of the corridors and crew quarters ("too roomy") to the reliance on the turbo lifts, etc.
There's even a two-page description of the entire supply chain that allows a 747 to fly from L.A. to New York! I just kept saying, out loud, "What's your point, man?!"
He makes several valid points, but I don't think any of them could've been implemented in 1966 on the budget they had, and frankly, nobody had time to put as much thought into it that Mr. Gerrold clearly has in the decades after the series went out of production!
Check out Blakes7 for renegades on the run.
Kind of. After SFS I came up with a whole storyline for a sequel that would not only keep them in the BoP, but also get them a free pass in Federation and Romulan space for services rendered. If you decide these movies are about the characters and not about Starfleet, it makes sense to jettison all the expensive baggage of portraying San Francisco and rebuilding the mushroom dock interior another time and instead put that money into some strange new worlds or maybe a few really bizarre character creations.
The whole privateer aspect always has appealed to me, in or out of TREK. When you make your calls while not answering to chain-of-command, you can't claim duty overrides ethics or any of that other crap, you just have to own up to your decisions. And of course Whedon eventually happened onto this notion (although I hate his lack of science) and gave us the wonderful fantastic I-probably-need-to-rewatch-the-series-for-the-umpteenth-time FIREFLY.
Crew quarters too roomy - must have hated TNG/VOY/ENT then.
I don't know whatever happened to my old Star Trek books, but I do recall not particularly liking The World of Star Trek. I suspect it was the first to go - I probably threw it out. In retrospect, I think David Gerrold may be sort of a forerunner of today's (generally speaking) generation of potty-mouthed, self-indulgent creators of fiction.
The whole tone of society has changed radically, and while I'm by no means a prude, just look at how young people today are influenced (among other things, of course) by this stuff. You can't find some kid on youtube who when, say, reviewing a movie, isn't spitting out mindless profanity at least every other sentence. Hardly creative, entertaining, or inspiring.
I have theories about exactly how all this started, but I won't bore you with any of that. I'll just leave it by saying that The World of Star Trek was not a treasured read from my youth.
The whole tone of society has changed radically, and while I'm by no means a prude, just look at how young people today are influenced (among other things, of course) by this stuff. You can't find some kid on youtube who when, say, reviewing a movie, isn't spitting out mindless profanity at least every other sentence. Hardly creative, entertaining, or inspiring.
I have theories about exactly how all this started, but I won't bore you with any of that
. I'll just leave it by saying that The World of Star Trek was not a treasured read from my youth.
Could you elaborate on this statement? I haven't read his books yet, so maybe the answers lie in his books, but for conversation's sake: What are you talking about here?
Well, I read the book 41 years ago and my memory isn't the sharpest, but veterans of 1970s ST fandom know this stuff. Some of it was surely in The Trouble With and not The World Of.
As I recall, Gerrold described meeting GR in person as being a nearly religious experience: if you were casting the role of God and couldn't get Charlton Heston, you'd go with Gene Roddenberry. So he starts by setting a worshipful tone.
Here goes my memory again, but I'm pretty sure Gerrold passed along the story of Gene Roddenberry valiantly fighting to keep a woman as second in command after "The Cage," but NBC being sexist and chauvinistic, and forbidding it.
Today we know that NBC execs were in favor of having a woman in that role, but they didn't think Majel Barrett had the talent and charisma to pull it off. Gene evidently made up the "mean-old-NBC" story to spare Majel's feelings (she was his primary extra-marital affair at the time), and then found he had to drop the woman-first-officer idea altogether to keep Majel from getting wise, and then found that as the story got out, it portrayed him as a heroic fighter for women's rights-- and he loved that phony image.
There might be some other examples of Gerrold hyping Roddenberry to the high heavens, but that's what I've got off the top of my head. I stand by my statement that he was a major promoter of the Roddenberry personality cult that ST fandom endured during the 70s (and that the finished product of ST:TMP finally put a dent in).
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