A Brief Guide to Star Trek

is going to another galaxy on an exploration voyage – the first trip of the kind. Our business is to study life in this new system’. It’sclose to the opening narration of
Star Trek
as a mission statement, and the episodic novel includes a crew embarked on a perilous exploration of unknown space. However, the author himself found it difficult to tailor his ideas for
Star Trek
.
    Philip José Farmer was another science fiction author who contributed a variety of story ideas, but failed to get an episode on air. His first proposal was titled ‘Image of the Beast’ (a title he also used for an erotic horror novel with no connection to his
Star Trek
idea). That, and another called ‘Mere Shadows’, didn’t get past the story outline stage. However, a third attempt, ‘The Shadow of Space’, appears to have progressed further. Farmer’s idea saw the
Enterprise
escape the confines of the physical universe altogether – truly going where no man had gone before. Although the outlandish idea was rejected, Farmer published it as a short story, stripped of all the
Star Trek
content. It appeared in the magazine
Worlds of If
and later in one of Farmer’s short story collections. He did the same with a fourth rejected idea, ‘Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind’. According to Farmer, his ideas were rejected as Gene Roddenberry found them ‘too sophisticated’ for the general television audience. He told
Starlog
magazine in 1990: ‘[Roddenberry] said his criterion is what his little old maiden aunt in Iowa would understand, and he said, “She would not understand these.” “Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind” originally involved a little idol that Captain Kirk had picked up in the ruins of a planet. It turns out to be a device that makes you lose memory two days in a row and you keep going backwards . . . eventually it’s a year before, and he’s in a new situation . . . I don’t think they could put “Sketches” across’. These ideas, and a fifth known as ‘The Uncoiler’, all remained unproduced.
    Authors Norman Spinrad and Theodore Sturgeon did succeed in getting episodes on air (‘The Doomsday Machine’ for Spinrad, the Hugo Award-winning ‘Amok Time’ and ‘Shore Leave’ for Sturgeon). Spinrad’s other script, co-written with writer–producer Gene L. Coon, was titled ‘He Walked Among Us’ and concerned a health food fanatic from theFederation taking over a planet and breaching the Prime Directive by reshaping its society according to his beliefs. As the inhabitants perceive the man as a god, Kirk finds it very difficult to remove him without also disrupting the planet’s society. It was an idea that would be returned to in
The Next Generation
instalment ‘Who Watches the Watchers?’ and the
Deep Space Nine
story ‘Accession’.
    Spinrad recalled he’d built the episode around an available standing set of an old village on the studio back lot. Additionally, the instalment was conceived by its co-author Gene Coon as a vehicle for entertainer Milton Berle, who would probably have fitted right in as one of
Star Trek
’s long list of would-be God-like beings, although Spinrad wasn’t keen on the casting. ‘I had Milton Berle and this village’, he explained. ‘I know that Berle can be a serious actor, but he likes weird get-ups. [Coon] rewrote a serious anthropological piece into something played for laughs.’ Unhappy with Coon’s rewrite, Spinrad asked Roddenberry to drop the script: ‘I killed my own script rather than have it presented in that way.’ He’d also eventually write a script for the aborted
Star Trek: Phase II
series.
    Sturgeon’s third script for
The Original Series
was to be ‘The Joy Machine’ (also called ‘The Root of All Evil’). Although based on a story outline by Sturgeon, the full teleplay was eventually written by Meyer Dolinsky, also the writer of ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ and three episodes of the 1960s anthology show
The Outer Limits
. In a tale similar to ‘This Side of Paradise’ (which probably led to the abandonment of ‘The Joy Machine’), Kirk and co visit a ‘perfect’ world where hard work is rewarded by a regular ‘payday’ session with the ‘joy machine’. Induced to abandon their ship, the
Enterprise
crew are co-opted into the society of the joy machine. The unmade tale was written up as a novel by James Gunn for Pocket Books in 1996. Also outlined by Sturgeon in 1968 but never made was the self-explanatory ‘Shore