And, pretty much, except when my anger got too intense, or my gorge got too buoyant, or when one of the little piss-ants got within arm’s reach, I have let it slide for thirty years.

Thirty years. That is a piece of time.

Probably more years than are owned by most of the people who will buy this book. And with the historical soapbox Star Trek stands upon, to insure its posterity (not to mention its view of “how things happened”), the story those under-30 readers will have had to swallow by the time they get to this book…well, Ellison’s somewhat jaundiced and politically unkempt telling of that history has about as much chance as a snowball in a cyclotron.

So. Speak no ill of the dead. And let it go, pal. Give it a rest. As my wife says, belt up.

And I have. For thirty years, more or less. I won’t dissemble and pretend that I haven’t tried to refute some of the most widely-held canards-cum-mythology that have circulated through the Star Trek world, at conventions, or in private conversations. But in the main, for the most part, partially out of dismay and partially out of weariness, I’ve let most of it pass. To attempt to stem the tide of fannish folderol and gossip would mean I’d have to devote every waking hour to an essentially pointless task. And it would be as likely to do any good as trying to sweep the beach clean of sand.

As for that “speak no ill of the dead” admonition, I only wish the same Christian Charity was visited on the living. Yet I never said anything about Roddenberry in private or public that I didn’t (or wouldn’t have) said to his face.

But trying to present another viewpoint of Roddenberry—and we’re talking now about all those years prior to his death, before the tell-all books by virtually every member of the cast, before the scathing revelations in GENE RODDENBERRY: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek (Hyperion, 1994) by investigative journalist Joel Engel, before even the whitewash biography by David Alexander—a man who was in Roddenberry’s hip pocket when Gene was alive, and managed to get to the task of grave-robbing Roddenberry’s life faster than the speed of blight—titled The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry: STAR TREK CREATOR (ROC, 1994)—trying to portray Roddenberry as anything approaching a fallible human being would bring down the tsunami of Trekkie wrath. To them, he was a bright and shining light, and they would eviscerate anyone who said otherwise. This is a degenerative process called “heroification.”

(As James W. Loewen writes in his 1995 book LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, “Heroification…much like calcification…makes people over into heroes. The media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest. …authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. …A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past. …It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history.”