Jon Korie, the executive officer of the ship is our central character. He deserves to be promoted to captain, but fate has conspired against him and his promotion is held in permanent limbo. This may be lucky for him, because the Star Wolf is a jinxed ship. She keeps killing her captains. This would let us have big-name guest stars come aboard to be captain of the Star Wolf for two or four episodes and then either die in combat, have a nervous breakdown, be eaten by Morthans, be recalled by the manufacturer, fall out the airlock or experience some other bizarre twist of fate.
One story we wanted to do had the Star Wolf caught by a Morthan battle cruiser in the very first scene of the episode, the “teaser.” The brand-new captain opens a channel and says, “We surrender,” and Brik immediately kills him. “Surrender is not an option.” The rest of the episode would be Brik’s court-martial. (The jury would be three Alliance Morthans, because only they could understand Brik’s reasoning.)
We wanted to establish Molly Williger as the ugliest woman in the galaxy—make her the butt of a legendary joke—and then give her the most seething and passionate love affair in television history, because not only the pretty people fall in love. Love is more than just a nice package of chest and cheekbones.
Every character on the ship would have a secret which would be revealed during the course of the series. Jon Korie’s secret is the most astonishing. (And on the elusive chance that we might still turn this thing into a TV series, I’m not going to reveal it here.) At one point, I even wrote a script putting the whole crew of the ship through the Mode Training—one of those personal-effectiveness courses that sometimes function like psychological boot camp.
And yes, one of the stories both Dorothy and I wanted to do was Blood and Fire, adapted from the episode I had written for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which they had never filmed.
Other writers of our acquaintance knew we were working on this series and several of them suggested story ideas that we knew immediately we wanted to use. Steve Boyett suggested “A Day In The Life” and Daniel Keys Moran gave us “The Knight Who Stayed Home.” With their permission, both of these stories were combined into a second Star Wolf novel, called The Middle of Nowhere. If the series ever goes into production, those two episodes will be part of it.
All of this work was enormously invigorating. We actually had the time to consider in depth a lot of development problems that under ordinary circumstances would have to be decided in a mad rush. We could talk not only about the immediate solution, but also about the long-term consequences to the entire series of each decision. It was a creative opportunity that few shows ever get. We also knew that if and when we ever got a firm commitment to go into production, we would, from the very first moment, be six months ahead of schedule. There would be questions we would not have to ask, because we had already worked out the answers.
Oh, yes—somewhere in all of this confusion, I adopted a little boy named Sean. (That particular adventure has since been documented in The Martian Child. It seemed like a very good idea at the time. It still seems a good idea today, eleven years later.) One day, my son asked me, “Daddy, what can I do in the TV show?” Before I could even figure out how to explain to an eight-year-old that television production is really not a great adventure for any child, it’s more boring than exciting, he began to explain, “I could be this weird-looking little guy who walks around in the background and doesn’t say anything.” And even as he was saying it, I recognized the opportunity for a marvelous sight gag—a short little “Martian” who would show up briefly in every show, handing someone a wrench or carrying some bizarre object down a corridor (like Alfred Hitchcock walking out of the Cumberland train station with a cello in the 1946 production of The Paradine Case). And if the series continued for several years, we could occasionally have someone wonder aloud about the growth of the Martian. So I told Sean I loved his idea and he should go off and draw a picture of what he thought his costume should look like. (I already knew what it would look like: something very easy to hang on a child, something very easy to remove.)
Eventually, a Canadian company agreed to provide production facilities and even a majority of funding for a Star Wolf television series. They had the foreign investors, they had the Canadian tax benefits, the money was there, all they needed was an American buyer to give us credibility.
At one point, the Sci-Fi Channel came aboard for a few months and even invested in a set of rewrites. We used that as an opportunity to increase the suspense, the sex and the action in the scripts, while clarifying the Morthan threat even more. Regretfully, we removed the gag of destroying the Endeavor in the first twenty minutes, but we replaced it with a situation that dramatically increased Korie’s internal dilemma. By now, we felt that the four one-hour pilot episodes were as good as we could create for a science fiction television series. And so did everyone else who read them. One executive said to us, “We have never had such a well-developed presentation laid on our desks. We have never seen pilot scripts so well-written and so intelligent.”
But then ... nothing happened. The Sci-Fi Channel got sold, a new executive came in, decisions were postponed. And nothing moved forward. The Canadian company had to do this, then they had to do that. Everything was contingent on everything else. And everything else was next week or next month. They stalled us for the better part of two years until the options expired and they went bankrupt. (Sheesh.)
One afternoon, I was discussing Blood and Fire with Dorothy Fontana, and as an experiment, I opened up a copy of my original Star Trek script and began looking to see how hard it would be to adapt the story. I did a global swap of character names. (I probably shouldn’t be admitting this, should I?) Picard became Parsons. Riker became Korie. Crusher became Williger. LaForge became Leen. The Enterprise became the Star Wolf. But after that, the parallels stopped. Then I read through the script to see what else had to be adjusted. Hmm. Quite a bit, actually. I had to get rid of the warp-drive engines, I had to restructure the problem without using the transporter and I had to take a long, hard look at the character relationships. None of them worked as a Star Wolf story. So I sat down and began working my way through the script, line by line, turning it into a real Star Wolf adventure and not simply a revised Star Trek episode.
It was an exciting process. The differences between the two were profound. (For one thing, we weren’t in production, and we still had the freedom, the luxury, to write for ourselves.) More important, I discovered some things about the Star Wolf that I hadn’t realized before—that we weren’t just telling stories about problems that could be solved easily in the last five minutes of the episode; no, we were examining the hearts and souls of our characters as they confronted the continuing challenges before them. There were consequences to their actions—moral, legal, political.
So I had to do a major rewrite of every scene, every character and every plot point in order to convert that original Star Trek script to a Star Wolf story. Of particular importance, if the captain of the ship violated a standing fleet order, her court-martial would be mandatory—even if she saved her ship and her crew. That became a critical dilemma, as important as the more immediate problem of the bloodworms.
I had a not-so-hidden agenda here. When I finished adapting the script, I had the outline for another Star Wolf novel. I had one more book contract pending with Bantam Books, and Blood and Fire would be the perfect property; they had already published two previous Star Wolf novels and Starhunt, the book that started the whole adventure. Turning Blood and Fire into a novel gave me the opportunity to get even deeper into all of the characters and I knew that, eventually, I would have to rewrite the Blood and Fire script to include many of the new scenes developed for the novel. (If/when this damn TV series ever gets on the air, Blood and Fire will probably be a two-part episode.)
When I finished this novel, the one you’re holding in your hands right now, Bantam Books chose not to publish it. They were shutting down their science fiction line. (But they
did pay me, in case you’re wondering.) Because the book was already part of a pre-existing series, few other publishers were interested; they’d have to buy all of the other out-of-print books in the series to go with it, and nobody was buying backlist books anymore. So the manuscript for this book sat on the shelf for a couple of years until Glenn Yeffeth of BenBella Books read it. The way he tells it, he got down on his knees and begged me for the opportunity to publish a new David Gerrold novel. The way I tell it, I’m the one begging, “Please publish my orphaned child.” The truth is probably somewhere in between.
There are now three novels in the Star Wolf trilogy. At the moment, I don’t expect to write any additional adventures, but I’m not ruling it out either. The first novel is The Voyage of the Star Wolf. The second is The Middle of Nowhere; the events in that book take place immediately after the events in the first novel. The events in Blood and Fire, however, do not occur until at least a year or two later. Maybe longer. Our original intention in the TV series was not to tell this story until we had already taken our characters through a whole series of other events, partly because we didn’t want to be accused of being so desperate that we had to recycle an old Star Trek script, and partly because the payoff at the end of this story was not one we wanted to get to quickly. Because Korie has endured so much by the time of this story, Dorothy and I both felt that he was entitled to at least one major personal victory. In this book, he gets two, both on the last page. (If you haven’t read it yet, no peeking!)
There are a number of adventures, developed for the TV series that come before this story that have not been novelized yet—in particular the destruction of Taalamar. In that proposed story, Korie learns that his family might have evacuated safely before their home world was destroyed. But now Taalamar is under bombardment by Morthan-directed asteroids and no matter how many rescue ships arrive to carry away refugees, millions of people will still die. The story we want to tell is Korie’s desperate search for his family on a doomed planet while the crew of the Star Wolf continues to evacuate other families and children. Because Dorothy Fontana has first dibs on writing that script, I haven’t tackled it as a novel. So Blood and Fire occurs much later, after Korie has proven himself more than once. (This is referred to in the text.)
Now about that TV series....
In 1999, we found another investor, who paid to develop some computer-generated spaceships and even a short proof-of-concept video. We took the series around town again, talking to a new set of executives, often in the same offices as before. And again everybody loved it, but nobody quite wanted to make the commitment. One studio said it was too dark, another said it was too light. One company felt it was too military, another said it wasn’t military enough.
In 2001, a prestigious special-effects company thought Star Wolf would be an excellent property to leverage themselves into becoming a complete production facility. We made the rounds again. Same offices, new executives. New ways of saying, “Wow! This is a great show!” One company loved it but didn’t have the resources. Another company loved it, but they were already in a deal with someone else and didn’t want to do two science fiction shows—“Why didn’t you show us this before?” At that meeting, my partners would have physically restrained me from hurling myself out an open window, except that we were on the first floor and there was little danger that I would hurt myself landing on an azalea bush.
Meanwhile, as I write this, there’s an executive at another studio who has just read our four pilot scripts, and he thinks that they would make a great TV series....
Coming soon from BenBella Books: The Un-Making of The Star Wolf—The Greatest TV Series You Never Saw. We’ll publish the whole horrifying history, all the different scripts, plus the bible. You can make up your own mind.
DAVID GERROLD
1 The Middle of Nowhere.
2 The Middle of Nowhere.
3 The Voyage of the Star Wolf.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
BenBella Books Edition
Copyright © 2003 by David Gerrold
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gerrold, David, 1944-
Blood and fire / by David Gerrold.—BenBella Books ed.
p. cm
eISBN : 978-1-935-61869-0
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