And then the original version—the one published in this book—the unabridged, unchanged, unscrewed version—won the Writers Guild Award as Most Outstanding Teleplay. Not the aired version; not the many-hands-in-the-soup version; but my own original story that John Black and Gene Roddenberry and director Joe Pevney and Solow and Justman and Shatner and Trek zombies who write dopey books like THE CAPTAIN’S LOGS have been telling people was too expensive, too lacking in drama, too inept to shoot as I wrote it. My story won the most prestigious award a Hollywood screenwriter can win from his peers, an award given only after blind voting based on hundreds of scripts submitted. Me, not Gene Coon or Roddenberry or any of the people who have said, as Roddenberry said in a 1987 interview in Cinefantastique, “I think Harlan’s a genius but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world. He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

I gotcher Scotty right here, Gene.

Anybody who ever read that script knows there’s no Scotty selling drugs. Or any of the other horse puckey that has been spread for more than twenty-five years.

Do I still burn? Gee, gang, sorry about that. Am I less than slobberingly attentive to the myths and the upheld torches of historical revisionism that make me look like a jerk and mythologize Roddenberry as a high-flying interplanetary rara avis? Does my manner offend thee? Yeah, I’m always getting complaints about that.

But when it comes to the end of the day, it was I, no one but the guy who created and developed and wrote about “The City on the Edge of Forever” who dreamed that dream for the rest of you to call the best of the best. You should have gotten better, though. You should have gotten the original.

But, sadly, to quote one last time, from the 19th Century French essayist Jules Renard: “Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

Think how interesting this screed would’ve been if I’d been permitted to tell you the whole truth.

Have a nice day. Have just a real nice day. And thank your mother for the chicken soup.

So now we come to that portion of the TV Guide source material I was unable to use in such a limited venue. Remember: the article I wrote was more than 4000 words in length—at least twice as long as the usual TV Guide causerie. And even though the magazine ran a sidebar they called Trail of Evidence that gave pretty good proof Roddenberry lied continually about “City,” they were reluctant to expend much more space on further “plaintiff’s exhibits.” But here we are at full length, and the Publisher wants you to see as much as we can reproduce.