David Gerrold

David Gerrold (born January 24, 1944) is an American science fiction screenwriter and novelist known for his script for the popular original Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", for creating the Sleestak race on the TV series Land of the Lost, and for his novelette "The Martian Child", which won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and was adapted into a 2007 film starring John Cusack. 2Early life Gerrold was born to a Jewish family on January 24, 1944 in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Van Nuys High School, Los Angeles Valley College, and San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge). 2Star Trek 3Star Trek: The Original Series Within days of seeing the Star Trek series premiere "The Man Trap" on 8 September 1966, 22-year-old Gerrold wrote a sixty-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. Two of the submissions of which he later had little recollection involved a spaceship-destroying machine, similar to Norman Spinrad's "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, 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 technolog