David Gerrold

The Voyage of the Star Wolf and The Middle of Nowhere: There's a pretty good website which summarizes the history behind these books; depending on which edition of the books you come across, you'll get some additional background information. Suffice it to say that Gerrold has tried to bring these tales to the small screen on a couple of occasions (scroll down to the article entitled "The Long March of Star Wolf" from 07/27/99), and it is a shame he never succeeded. While not great written science fiction, they are much more interesting than most of the dreck that passes for science fiction on television. For example, if this series had been done the first time I heard about it (through an article and some beautiful illustrations by Andrew Probert in Cinefantastique), and done the way Gerrold wanted it to be done, all the "buzz" you hear about the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica would be applied to these tales. Some nifty stuff here: a ship that is less than perfect, a crew that is definately less than perfect, a war that isn't going as well as it should, and the conflict is not resolved in one episode. It would have been a wonderful television series! Hopefully I'll get to the prequel/sequel/parallel universe novel, Starhunt (not republished by Ben Bella Books like these) as well as the latest book in the series, Blood and Fire before the year is out. One thing is for sure, like the (in)famous Chtoor series that Gerrold seems to be forever finishing, I'll probably get caught up with the series before the promised next installment is published!

Probably the most interesting part of these books are the introductions and afterwords in the various editions that I have, some by Gerrold, some by other authors who have worked with him. Neil Gaiman commented in one article I read that he held a record for the most unproduced scripts in Hollywood. Reading about Gerrold's many frustrated efforts to bring some intelligence to science fiction on television you wonder if he might hold that title (with Harlan Ellison in close proximity).