The 18 Star Trek (TOS) Episodes Written by Science Fiction Authors
14. May, 2009 
5 Comments
What with all the Star Trek hoopla for the origins re-do, not to mention the release of the Best Original Trek DVD, I decided to take a look at not just the best but ALL of the episodes of the original series that were written by real science fiction authors.
By real, I mean no disrespect to writers who made their name scripting for the movies or other television shows (they earned their chops too – go take a look at David P. Harmon’s credits as a stunning example:? I had no idea one person could write so many Gilligan’s Island episodes without going insane…) but these are not names that appeared in the magazines, or folks who you could talk to in the hallways at conventions (indeed, they probably didn’t write for or publish fanzines and none of them have won Hugo or Nebula awards – unless you count group effort for the episodes of ST:TOS that DID win a Hugo Award).
Almost to a man (and to a man if you consider how young David Gerrold was when he sold his first script) all of these writers started writing science fiction in the? 50’s, cut their teeth in the pulps (mostly) and went on to become highly recognizable giants of the field.
(The episodes link to Hulu and are the ‘re-mastered’ versions. Author names link to more information about the author – and sometimes to their personal websites.)
Season one:
The Corbomite Manuever – Jerry Sohl
The Enemy Within – Richard Matheson
The Man Trap – George Clayton Johnson
What Are Little Girls Made Of? – Robert Bloch
Shore Leave – Theodore Sturgeon
Arena – Frederic Brown
The City On The Edge Of Forever – Harlan Ellison
Season Two:
Catspaw – Robert Bloch
Amok Time – Theodore Sturgeon
The Doomsday Machine – Norman Spinrad
Wolf In The Fold – Robert Bloch
Mirror, Mirror – Jerome Bixby
The Trouble With Tribbles – David Gerrold
By Any Other Name – Jerome Bixby
Season Three:
The Day Of The Dove – Jerome Bixby
Whom Gods Would Destroy – Jerry Sohl (and Lee Erwin)
The Cloud Minders – David Gerrold (and Oliver Crawford)
Requiem For Methuselah – Jerome Bixby
Of special note – Bixby edited Planet Stories at one point and is the author of the famous Twilight Zone episode – It’s A Good Life.
Robert Bloch penned the famous Hitchcock movie Psycho
Richard Matheson is the author of I Am Legend
The SFRA named its award for best short fiction of the year after Theodore Sturgeon
and Harlan Ellison is still trying to stick it to Paramount!
David Gerrold sold to, and worked on a bunch of, Star Trek, before he sold any fiction to book or magazine outlets, so you can only include him, by your definition, retroactively, which doesn’t seem quite fair.
“Arena,” the ST episode, gives a credit, title and all, to Fredric Brown, but this came from ST buying the rights to the story after Gene Coon had already written the script, and the producers became aware that it way too close to Brown’s story for them not to be sued. So wrote and said both Herbert F. Solow, and Robert Justman, in their books and interviews, and I don’t know why they’d lie. (They didn’t use phrasing about not wanting to be sued, but the motivation was obvious.)
“Bixby edited Planet Stories at one point and is the author of the famous Twilight Zone episode – It’s A Good Life.”
No, he’s the author of the famous story “It’s A Good Life”; he didn’t write the Twilight Zone script. The episode was written by Rod Sterling.
“indeed, they probably didn’t write for or publish fanzines”
Neither did anyone on your list, other than Harlan, start their writing by writing for fanzines. Bloch wrote for fanzines only long after being a famous pro, and the same for the handful of other fanzine contributions by others on your list.
Mentioning fanzines as having something to do with being a “real” science fiction writer seems unconnected to reality, both here, and in general.
I say this as someone who was, of course, active in fanzine fandom for decades, and who was also a junior dogsbody in sf publishing: there’s just not all that much connection between fanzines and sf writing: the overwhelming majority of fanzine writers have never written sf, and the overwhelming majority of sf writers have never written for fanzines, let alone started out in them. In particular, the list above has only one writer who started in fanzine fandom, and only one other writer who did any significant writing for fanzines at all, which makes your connection very weird.
For that matter, the assertion that sf writers who don’t hang out at conventions aren’t “real” sf writers is completely weird. “Real” sf writers are the writers who write “real” sf. Period, end of story. Who they socialize with doesn’t change their stories.
(I’m reminded of the chant “One of us! One of us!” from Freaks, but that’s not actually a statement about literature.
)
I love Harlan, warts and all.
I think this is what helped make Star Trek what it is. It wasn’t just another Hollywood fistfight, but had one foot in the sf world.
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and Harlan Ellison is still trying to stick it to Paramount!
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hehehehe