From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Enterprise - the end is nigh!
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:19:58 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert MacIntosh" <macbuccfo at msn.com>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 1:37 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Enterprise - the end is nigh!

> James Blish? No! No! His career was well established long before Star
Trek
> came along. He just happened to love the series and was a fan enough to
> convince the powers to be to let him put the original series scripts into
> something readable.

Jim never "love[d] the series," and his "novelizations" of those scripts
were done by rote and only barely "something readable."  He took a lot of
kidding and criticism from his peers about it at the time.  His attitude
was in fact rather cynical:  he hoped to exploit ST's popularity to advance
his own career.   Sadly, this did not happen; almost the reverse.

By this point in his career, Blish was an alcoholic who drank himself into
a stupor as he wrote, each day, producing around five pages of manuscript a
day, of which the last two were unusable.   Not a prolific writer under
such circumstances.

--Ted White