Caught the last chapter on Spider's podcast, and this is good stuff. ( )

Primarily, I picked this collection of random works by sf author David Gerrold up to get ahold of his abandoned Star Trek: The Next Generation script, "Blood and Fire". This is actually the third time I've experienced that story: it's been reworked into a Star Wolf novel and a Phase II fanfilm. Quality-wise, this is somewhere between them. It's not as good as the novel (though that novel is the weakest Star Wolf story), but it's not as awful as the fanfilm. (Few things are, though.) The story just doesn't have any point to it; everyone slowly learns things, then a guy goes nuts. (Somehow the fanfilm stretches this not-enough-for-45-minutes plot out into 90 minutes.) Then there's a crappy ending that would have required Wil Wheaton to deliver "It's a Sparkle-Dancer!" while looking "amazed", which surely would have made him even more hated. Supposedly this episode was canned because Gene Roddenberry's assistant didn't like the fact that there were gay characters in it, but I have to wonder if it wasn't really canned for being terrible. Though the existence of episodes like "Code of Honor" would tend to disprove that notion.

The rest of the book is a mixed bag. Gerrold is rarely as funny as he thinks he is, and he goes to great lengths to demonstrate it by including periodic excerpts from The Quote-Book of Solomon Short, a set of "witty" aphorisms. His limericks are better, perhaps because they are fewer. "The Strange Death of Orson Welles" was never published before, and I can see why, and "...And Eight Rabid Pigs" is resoundingly predictable. Also: I suspect it is chock-full of sf "scene" in-jokes which are, you know, totally hilarious to those of us who didn't attend conventions in the 1980s. "The Kennedy Enterprise" (which postulates that JFK was an actor on Star Trek who replaced Shatner) and "King Kong: Behind the Scenes" (which postulates that the ape in King Kong was played by a real giant ape) aren't even stories so much as ideas. And "It Needs Salt," a seemingly-endless fifty-page excerpt from one of Gerrold's Chtorr novels, has convinced me to never pick up a volume in it. I can see why it blossomed from a trilogy into a seven-book series-- it's because nothing ever happens other than some smug guy listing things at you.

Later in his carreer, Gerrold seems to try to go a little "literary" in his sf, with mixed results. I just could not get into "Digging in Gehenna", "The Green Man", "Dancer in the Dark", and "thirteen o'clock", many of which seemed to mistake "not explaining what's going on" for "high art". It does work in "The Diamond Sky" and "Riding Janis", which have sharply drawn characters amidst neat sf ideas, though they do tend to leave those ideas unresolved.

There are some gems, though. "The Martian Child" is an autobiographical chronicle of Gerrold's attempts to adopt and raise a son as a single, gay man. "The Baby Cooper Dollar Bill" actually is funny, primarily because it is short enough to not outstay its welcome. "Chester" actually is funny and dark at the same time. And the best story in the book is "Chess with a Dragon", a (nicely) convoluted eighty-page diplomatic thriller about humanity finding itself trapped in the universe's largest pyramid scheme. I don't know that the highlights are enough to make the book actually worth my time and money, however. Oh well.