The City on the Edge of Forever Read Free

investigative journalist Joel Engel, before even the whitewash biography by David Alexander—a man who was in Roddenberry’s hip pocket when Gene was alive, and managed to get to the task of grave-robbing Roddenberry’s life faster than the speed of blight—titled The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry : STAR TREK CREATOR (ROC, 1994)—trying to portray Roddenberry as anything approaching a fallible human being would bring down the tsunami of Trekkie wrath. To them, he was a bright and shining light, and they would eviscerate anyone who said otherwise. This is a degenerative process called “heroification.”
    (As James W. Loewen writes in his 1995 book LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong , “Heroification…much like calcification…makes people over into heroes. The media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest. …authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. …A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past. …It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history.”
    (As Washington Irving wrote in his heavily-heroificated biography of Christopher Columbus, “Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition.”)
    By wildly extravagant heroification of Gene Roddenberry, all the untruths, all the false credit, all the betrayal and perfidious behavior he wallowed in, has been permitted to be flensed. …leaving only this glowing icon who wouldn’t tell a lie or hurt a fly. Yeah, and there are actually schmucks who think Adolf Hitler made the trains run on time.
    So I tried to let it all pass, without comment most of the time. But thirty years is a piece of change. It is much longer to keep getting kicked in the ass than anyone should have to put up with.
    So I let myself get talked into writing this book.
    Yeah, yeah, I know: “You let yourself get talked into writing this book? Come on, Ellison! Who the hell’s supposed to believe that ? Ain’t this the same world we went to bed in last night? Isn’t the reason for doing a Star Trek book of any kind—picayune biography, sharecropping derivative novel, moron quiz book, obsessional trivia book, adolescent episode guide—for the money? Follow the money? We’re not fools, Ellison! Yeah, we might swallow any crap the Paramount p.r. mill cares to throw out, and all preproduction inside-secrets desiderata, but we ain’t naive enough to believe you’re doing this book for any other reason than money.”
    So okay, all right, all you little cynical television goobers, believe what the hell you choose. I say I was talked into doing this book, that left to my own devices I’d have spent my time on more worthwhile projects, and if I make money off this thing, well, since I’ve never seen more than a pittance from “The City on the Edge of Forever,” while every thug and studio putz and semiliterate bandwagon-jumper and merchandiser has grown fat as a maggot in a corpse off what I created, then you can chalk it up to achieving something not even close to balance in the Unjust Universe. But if you want the truth, here it is.
    There is only one reason I’m doing this book:
     
    FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
     
    “It is not at all to justify myself that I’ve been doing all this talking. …But no! That’s a lie! I precisely wanted to justify myself. I make this little note for myself, gentlemen. I don’t want to lie. I’ve given my word.”
    —from NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
     
    For thirty years I’ve had to listen to others shoot off their faces about how they saved “City.” How they rewrote this and trimmed that and suffered oh so awfully with the irresponsible Ellison.[1]   For thirty years I’ve slapped back only when they got me too angry to lay back…or when they got within arm’s reach. And