JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 322 из 359It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when Man first emerged. I postulated a parallel development of reptile life that might have developed into the dominant species on Earth had not mammals prevailed. I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek future, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.
"Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, `You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’ "I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, `There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, `Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, " I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.” Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!”
In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Bird-a name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine , a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's.” Cordwainer is an archaic English word for "shoemaker"; so the literal meaning of Ellison's pen name for scripts which he feels have been perverted beyond any kind of useful life is "one who makes shoes for birds." It is, I think, as good an explanation as any for the work that television is engaged in, and suggests quite well the nature of its usefulness.
"Trabulus listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes. Then he said, `You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Maya calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’ "I looked at Gene; Gene looked at me; he said nothing. I looked at Trabulus and said, `There weren't any Mayans at the dawn of time.' And he said, `Well, who's to know the difference?' And I said, " I'm to know the difference. It's a dumb suggestion.' So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn't I do it if I wanted to write this picture. So I said, "I'm a writer. I don't know what the fuck you are!' And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.” Which leaves the rest of us mortals, who can never find exactly the right word at exactly the right time, with nothing to say but "Right on, Harlan!”
In cases where he felt his work had become so watered down that he no longer wanted his name on the credits, he would substitute the name of Cordwainer Bird-a name that comes up again in "The New York Review of Bird" in Strange Wine , a madly amusing story that might well be subtitled "The Chicago Seven Visit Brentano's.” Cordwainer is an archaic English word for "shoemaker"; so the literal meaning of Ellison's pen name for scripts which he feels have been perverted beyond any kind of useful life is "one who makes shoes for birds." It is, I think, as good an explanation as any for the work that television is engaged in, and suggests quite well the nature of its usefulness.