Introduction to
WITH A FINGER IN MY I

One of the most peculiar of all the superpeculiar facets of the "sf writer generality" is that so many of our most outstanding writers live life-styles that are the very antithesis of what their stories deal with. I'll give you a couple of f'rinstances.

Isaac Asimov writes some of the most far-flung fictions ever conceived by the mind of mortal man (and I'm not just referring to The Sensual Dirty Old Man by "Dr. A."). But he won't fly in airplanes. Space journeys to the far side of the Universe he dashes off with his left hand, but his right trembles like a spastic's when he nears a 747.

Robert Silverberg has written novels in which tri-vid and holograms are commonplaces, yet until recently he wouldn't have a TV set in his house.

I won't name any names, because I don't feel like belittling my friends, but if pressed to the wall (like if for instance you had my mother and were holding her as hostage in the matter) I could rattle off the names of a dozen top sf writers whose stories deal exclusively with the living habits and mores of worlds-of-tomorrow, who write with familiarity and detail that borders on minutiae, of the dress and speech patterns of the world of the future. Yet every one of them dresses as though it was the early 1940's, and they speak slang straight out of Studs Lonigan. They even vocally put down the creature comforts provided by the technological wonders their stories have predicted. It is as if they conceived of those wonders as worthwhile only as long as they were figments of the imagination; but let them become realities and they are treated with the contempt usually reserved by writers for one of their number who hits with a bestseller.

And so now, with a new generation of sf writers emerging, many of whom are living life-styles the older and more reserved members of the clan might call "pointless" or "counter productive" because they resemble too much the way of the hippie, we have the first of the sf writers to come to us not from pulp magazines or hardcovers or even the mainstream . . .but from television.

The first sf child of his times, David Gerrold.

David Gerrold, né David Jerrold Friedman, got his break writing for Star Trek, the television series so popular a few years ago. He wrote for that series a segment titled "The Trouble with Tribbles" that was marked by inventiveness, humor of the whacky Henry Kuttner sort, expertise in the medium of visual effects, and professionalism of a high order. I assure those of you writers who put down scriptwriting as a bastard form of the art, that it is a highly complex, very demanding and difficult medium in which to work. I wish I had a dollar for every Big Name sf writer who thought he could just waltz into TV scriptwriting, and a month later, right around pick-up&cut-off time, was slid out the studio gates on his Big Name backside. So when I say David Gerrold's first time out was marked by expertise and professionalism, I am not just whistling Apartheid.

David sold "The Trouble with Tribbles" in 1967. It was nominated for a Hugo award in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Convention (held in Berkeley in 1968), and came in second behind another Star Trek script, which is pretty fair for a first-timer. At that convention, incidentally, the ancient and onerous fan custom of auctioning off an hour of a writer's time—the monies to be donated to the convention sinking fund—if you have attended a sf convention you know the word "sinking" is used advisedly—was once again pursued. Your editor was auctioned off for seventy-two dollars, Gerrold was auctioned off for twenty-two dollars and one of his furry little tribbles was auctioned off for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, which says something about the market value of six foot tall, one hundred and fifty pound, brown-haired, hazel-eyed Star Trek scenarists, as compared to useless balls of fluff. But then, no one ever denied that Star Trek "trekkies" are bats from the git-go.

Moving right along . . .

Since the unseemly notoriety attendant on airing of his script, David (born an Aquarian on 1/24/44) sold other teleplay treatments and episodes to Star Trek, most of which never got past the preliminary stages. The sanity and ethics of some of the Star Trek production personnel has frequently been called into question, but in this case the lucidity of their caution and good sense shines through like a nova.

Surging forward from this impressive career opener, David struck forcefully on several creative fronts:

He was hired to write a film treatment for Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and was fired (David swears) for doing it right. That is, the "producer," a Hollywood type gentleman who'd bought the book because his girl friend had read it, though he hadn't, fired David when our Gerrold told him to take his girl friend's ideas for the way the movie should be written and jam them up his, her, or both their nether apertures in the key of C#. (He was also hired to develop an original screen story titled Whatever Happened to Millard Fillmore?) As of this writing, neither film has seen release, though Gerrold has.

He sold a plethora of stories to magazines and original anthologies, including Harry Harrison's NOVA and A,DV. The story you are about to read was David's third or fourth submission. He first submitted a very long, incredibly moronic thing called "In the Deadlands." Very dumb story. Full of pages of pseudo artsycraftsy nonsense like this:

The men tramped all that day.

 
Tramp.

     Tramp.

          Tramp.

                Tramp.

                     Tramp.

     They tramped into the night.
 

And that's all there'd be on the damned page. I'd have had to pay him five thousand dollars for the use of the silly thing, just on page-count alone. No, we are much better off with the story herein offered. Besides, it's a goodie.

He wrote novels and sold them. The Flying Sorcerers (originally titled "The Misspelled Magishun") in collaboration with Larry Niven, published in August of 1971 by Ballantine. Yesterday's Children, bought but as of this writing unpublished by Dell. Spring 1972, The Space Skimmer, from Ballantine and a book of short stories, still untitled. When Harlie Was One, from Ballantine, late 1972,, and a sequel to The Space Skimmer in early 1973. Additionally, a first hardcover sale: to Random House: The Man Who Folded Himself.

He edited anthologies. The much-touted and long-awaited Generation, from Dell, featuring new writers; and Protostars from Ballantine.

All of this while working full-time as a clerk in a liquor store. Now tell me Gerrold doesn't have all the credentials for being a great science fiction writer!

But all kidding aside, folks . . .

David recently returned from a five month stay in Ireland. He lived in a suburb of Dublin called Dun Laoghaire, just four blocks from James Joyce Tower and a few miles from fellow expatriate sf'er Anne McCaffrey. He swears he had nothing to do with feeding the Protestants to the Catholics.

Let's see, is there anything else you should know about Gerrold? Mmm, yeah, a few things.

•He graduated from San Fernando Valley State College in 1967 with a B.A. in Theater Arts, and prior to his graduation attended Los Angeles Valley Junior College where he majored in Art and Journalism, and then University of Southern California majoring in Cinema.

•His professional career began in 1963 at the age of 19 when he produced a ten-minute animated educational film called A Positive Look at Negative Numbers for which he wrote the script, did the animation, inked and painted eels and there from received honorable mention for same from the Educational Film Library Association.

•He plays the violin. Not terribly distinguishedly.

•He is an alumnus of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, out of which your editor was hurled in 1954 at Ohio State University, and about which your editor assures you nothing good can be said. Scratch two points for Gerrold.

•In 1968, when he received his Hugo nomination, he was 23 years old, the youngest active member of the Writers Guild of America, the guild of the Hollywood TV and film writers.

And finally, about this story, and its acquisition, the following must be said, merely to keep Gerrold in his place. Next to your editor, whose ego problems have been diagnosed in detail by no less a psychiatric authority than the European sf novelist Stanislaw Lem (whose conclusions about me terminate just this side of my being incarcerated as a dangerous psychopath), David Gerrold has an egomania terrible to confront. When he offered this story for publication, though it was worth the same money offered to all other authors in the book, I insisted he take one-third the rate, just to break into A,DV. It was an act of love and compassion, not parsimoniousness, I assure you.

For without these little acts intended to bring David back to Earth regularly, with a background and a promise of wonders such as David has already shown, he would be barely tolerable.

I know you will read this story, bearing these facts in mind, with reserve and dispassion. And when you tell him how much you liked it, do it left-handedly.

After all, we have to live with him.