Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:37:25 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Enterprise - the end is nigh!
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

> twhite8 at cox.net 4/20/2005 6:19:58 PM >>>

snippage

>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.

"Ironically the last six or seven of those [Star Trek] books were
apparently written by the team of his wife and mother in law(!)"
<http://www.oivas.com/blish/>

Somewhere I read that one reason for the Trek novelizations was for the
money to pay for his cancer treatments, I could very well be wrong.

Here's a nice short bio: http://www.answers.com/topic/james-blish
& an interesting page: http://www.blish.org/gens/1380I.html - be sure
to scroll through it all, more Blish stuff on the bottom.
He lived in Alexandria, VA 1966 to 1969, on Ft Hunt Road I think.

mjw