Ever since all the reading I did about journal writing recently, I’ve been fascinated with diaries and letters (again – as a teen I soaked up collections of Anne Morrow Lindberg’s letters as well as several memoirs by others, the most unforgettable for me being Jane Goodall’s account of life with the wild chimpanzees, In the Shadow of Man).
Today I almost missed a small treasure for a Star Trek fan like me. I accidentally opened my feed reader page, and just as I clicked off it, the words Star Trek popped into view, so I clicked back to see what the mention was about, and found this about an exchange of letters between Gene Roddenberry and Isaac Asimov regarding the original Star Trek series. It appears Isaac Asimov had written an article for TV Guide about SF on television and had some criticisms of the show that Gene Roddenberry felt a need to respond to. The result, a helpful exchange that led to improvements in story lines intended to expand on Captain Kirk’s character and take advantage of William Shatner’s creative range.
Two of the results of this exchange that I remember distinctly were the episode in which Captain Kirk had his personality split in two by a transporter accident, and another in which a woman used a contraption to switch her personality into Kirk’s body and his into hers.