Editing David Gerrold (section)

==== ''Star Trek: The Original Series'' ====
{{main|Star Trek: The Original Series}}
Within days of seeing the ''Star Trek'' series premiere "[[The Man Trap]]" on September 8, 1966, 22-year-old Gerrold<ref>Hanley, Jr., John. [http://www.findingmywaymovie.com/davidgerrold.html "David Gerrold Interview"] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20130110222744/http://www.findingmywaymovie.com/davidgerrold.html |date=January 10, 2013 }}. Finding My Way: Wisdom of the Ages for All Ages. Retrieved June 23, 2013.</ref> wrote a 60-page outline for a two-part episode called "Tomorrow Was Yesterday" about the ''Enterprise'' discovering a ship launched from Earth centuries earlier. Although ''Star Trek'' producer [[Gene L. Coon]] rejected the outline, he realized Gerrold was talented and expressed interest in his submitting some story premises. Bearing preliminary titles and, in some cases, preliminary character names, Gerrold submitted five premises.<ref>David Gerrold, ''The Trouble with Tribbles''</ref>

Two of the submissions of which he later had little recollection involved a spaceship-destroying machine, similar to Norman Spinrad's "[[The Doomsday Machine (Star Trek: The Original Series)|The Doomsday Machine]]", and a situation in which Kirk had to play a chess game with an advanced intelligence using his crew as chess pieces. A third premise, "Bandi", involved a small being running about the ''Enterprise'' as someone's pet, and which empathically sways the crew's feelings and emotions to comfort it, even at someone else's expense.

A fourth premise, "The Protracted Man", applied science fiction to an effect seen in ''[[West Side Story (1961 film)|West Side Story]]'', when Maria twirls in her dancing dress and the colours separate. Gerrold's story involved a man transported from a shuttlecraft trying out a new space warp technology. The man is no longer unified, separating into three visible forms when he moves, separated by a fraction of a second. As efforts are undertaken to correct the condition and move the ''Enterprise'' to where corrective action can be taken, the protraction worsens.

{{rquote|right|<poem>Since I first wrote that damn script for Gene
And the electrical picture machine
Tribbles have chased their creator
From here to [[Decatur, Georgia|Decatur]].
Nobody knows of the tribbles I've seen.</poem>|David Gerrold<ref name="bbcgerrold">{{cite web | url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/interviews/gerrold/printpage.html | title=David Gerrold – The Trouble with Tribbles writer | publisher=BBC | access-date=May 7, 2011}}</ref>}}

The fifth premise, "The Fuzzies", was also initially rejected by Coon, but a while later he changed his mind and called Gerrold's agent to accept it. Gerrold then expanded the story to a full television story outline entitled "A Fuzzy Thing Happened to Me...", and it eventually became "The Trouble with Tribbles". The name "Fuzzy" was changed because [[H. Beam Piper]] had written novels about a fictional alien species of the same name (see ''[[Little Fuzzy]]''). The script went through numerous rewrites, including, at the insistence of Gerrold's agent, being re-set in a stock frontier town instead of an "expensive" space station. Gerrold later wrote a book, ''The Trouble with Tribbles'', telling the story of producing the episode and his earlier premises.

"[[The Cloud Minders]]" from the third season has a story credited to Gerrold and [[Oliver Crawford]].

<blockquote>I came in with what I thought was a near-perfect Star Trek story, which is we find a culture that isn't working for everybody and fix it. But my original ending was that, as they're flying off, [[James T. Kirk|Kirk]] says, "Well, we solved another one." [[Spock]] says, "Well, actually, it'll take years and years and years for all of these changes to be put in place." And [[Leonard McCoy|McCoy]] says, "I wonder how many children are going to die in the meantime." So the idea was, "Let's get gritty. We're not going to change things overnight, but we can put changes in place that will have long-term effects." There was also more to the story that was about the social issue, and there was no magical zenite gas that was causing the problem. [[Fred Freiberger|Freddy Freiberger]] and [[Margaret Armen]] came in and changed it to a "Let's solve it all in the last five minutes with gas masks" (ending). And I thought, "That's really not a very good story. It doesn't do what [[Gene Roddenberry]] or [[Gene L. Coon]] would have been willing to do." So I was disappointed.<ref name=Gerrold>[http://www.startrek.com/article/trek-writer-david-gerrold-looks-back-part-1 Trek Writer David Gerrold Looks Back – Part 1]</ref></blockquote>

''The Trouble with Tribbles'' was one of two books Gerrold wrote about ''Star Trek'' in the early 1970s after the original series had been canceled. His other was an analysis of the series, entitled ''The World of Star Trek'', in which he criticized some of the elements of the show, particularly Kirk's habit of placing himself in dangerous situations and leading landing parties himself.