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Acknowledgments

Only time will tell. Those who deserve thanks in the Hard Times of one year, turn out to be somewhat less deserving in the Harsh Glare of three decades later. We live and learn. Sometimes we live and learn and get so damned angry we forget earlier kindnesses blunted by the ache of betrayal. Which is about as Zen as I care to get.

Back then, when the series was just debuting and I was writing the teleplay you’ll be reading here, both Herb Solow and Bobby Justman were extraordinarily kind to me. Time has passed away, and maybe memory has dimmed, and I ain’t very happy about some of the things these two pals of days-gone have written and said about events covered in this book…but I remember with clarity how they befriended me back then, and I would rather dwell on those times than these. So, I thank Herb and Bob.

Steadfast from the git-go, David Gerrold and John D. F. Black and Dorothy Fontana, whom you know as D. C. Fontana. Years have slipped behind us, the four of us, and Johnny’s beard has grown to truly Moseslike proportions; and David just got around to writing the best story of his career (“The Martian Child”) and they gave him a Hugo and a Nebula for it, and he’s finally managed to shuck off that cloaca of being “just a Star Trek tv writer”; and Dorothy, well, despite a truly recent stunning revelation included in her Afterword to this volume, I confess to deep and unassailable admiration and affection. These are four from the old days (and from this four-year agony of putting City between covers). It took four years because it was the hardest, probably nastiest, job of writing I’ve ever had to do, and when it was almost finished, Gene Roddenberry screwed me up yet one more time by dying.

Here are the soldiers and scavengers and hustlers and shotgun-riders who helped get this book into your hands. Please kindly do not forget this list. Commit it to memory. When those of you who will get demented at what I’ll be saying in these pages run amuck and come with blazing torches to schlep me out of my bed for crucifixion, I’d like to think all these aiders and abetters will likewise dot the landscape with their anguished bodies. No one likes to be the only yotz at the party.

In no particular order:

Mark Evanier; David S. Rosenbaum at Paramount legal; Richard Curtis; Larry Closs, Executive Editor at TV Guide; Kevin Ryan at Pocket Books, who served as amenuensis; Sharon Buck; Bill Amend, creator of the wonderful cartoon strip, Fox Trot, for allowing me to reprint the gag on page 46 [of the original version of this text]; and to a decent and honorable investigative journalist who cannot be named, and to employees of NBC and Paramount who cannot be named, and to divers correspondents, informants, moles and insiders who cannot be named…my secret thanks to you all. Have no fear: they could pound my balls flat with a steel-stamping press, and they’ll never get your names from me; not even yours, Arthur.