Now we come to the section of this Introductory essay that was excerpted in a recent TV Guide Special on the Trek phenomenon. I was asked to write the piece by Larry Closs, senior editor at TV Guide. He contacted me (if I recall accurately) late in December of 1994, and he asked me if I was now ready, after all those years of the Roddenberry version, to tell the Ellison version of how “City” came to be. I was extremely reluctant. Ask Closs, he’ll tell you. I said no a few times, capping the refusal with the phrase, “TV Guide hasn’t got enough money to get me to write this sordid little epic.” He asked how much money that would be. Now, since I know that TV Guide, for all its enormous circulation and ocean-swallowing advertising revenues, pays some of the worst rates in magazine writing, I named a figure about five times what their best pay-out had been in my experience. Closs called back later that day and said, “You got it.”

Well, ’pon mah soul! What an epiphany, folks! There was actual rowrbazzle size money to be made from this kind of thing. Not just everyone else with their pig-snouts in the trough, but li’l ole me, too! So I wrote it. And Closs even reproduced some of the photographic evidence that proves I’m not just makin’ this shit up as I go along. (And there’s all of that stuff, plus more, here in the full-length book version. We want you should get your money’s worth. Also, we want the winged monkeys who’ll come to carry me off should have a hard time saying I’m a big fat liar, when you can see the actual documents here reproduced.)

So I wrote the article.

And the first phone call on my answering machine after the issue hit the newsstands, was the hysterically tearful voice of a woman who—in properly Roddenberry perfect-humanity manner—left no name, but in heart-rendingly (albeit cowardly) fashion excoriated me. “You rotten person,” she screamed, “you should die and burn in hell forever! You aren’t fit to speak Gene Roddenberry’s name, you lying sonofabitch bastard!” And on and on, without much originality or innovative use of defamatory verbiage. (Don’t you just hate it when some plucky little pustule summons up the sneaky strength to give you an anonymous call, and the best they can come up with is fuck you? If you’re going to go at it, do try to heed H. L. Mencken’s admonitions about the pallid nature of American cursing.)

But, astonishingly, thereafter, every single letter or phone call or InterNet message passed along to me (I have no computer or modem or interest in wasting my life on these electronic yenta boards) congratulated me for having the (what one reader called) “ethical muscle” to tell it “like it was.” Well, gee whillikers, folks, how swell that you thought I was an icon of rectitude and justified moral indignation. I just have one question to ask: