Ishmael - Let me Say This About That

ISHMAEL – LET ME SAY THIS ABOUT THAT

            People have asked me, Have I ever written fan fiction?

            When I started writing Star Trek stories for my few friends in High School in the fall of 1966, as far as I knew there WAS no media fan fiction. I had two friends, both struck with that first season of Star Trek as I was. We wrote Star Trek stories for each other, but there was no network of fans and no way we could have gotten in touch with them if there had been. As far as we knew, it was just us.

            Ditto with a sort-of Western called Here Come the Brides, which included in the cast Mark Lenard, the actor who played Spock’s father in the Trek episode “Journey to Babel.” (And the Romulan Commander in the previous season’s episode, “Balance of Terror.”) OF COURSE a cross-over story was inevitable. (MANY other fans came to this conclusion independently, as I later learned). (These weren’t the only TV shows we wrote stories about, either. I blush when I think of some of them).

            When I started writing Ishmael, I was still living in Riverside. My agent called me saying that Pocket Books (a division of Simon & Schuster) had acquired the Star Trek franchise, and were looking for already-published science fiction authors who had Star Trek stories sitting around in their files. I dug out the manuscript of Ishmael that I’d written for my friends, about the first third of what it later became. I knew MUCH less then about how licensing worked, but I wrote to the editor of the new Trek line explaining that it was a cross-over, and saying that I could easily and cheerfully re-write it in a generic Western milieu – a cow-town in the 1870s, I think.

            I’m glad I kept a carbon of that letter. (This was slightly before the days when photocopying was easy and cheap).

            The editor (the second one of the line already – the Star Trek line at Pocket went through four or five editors during the time I worked with them) told me, “I checked with the Legal Department and they say there isn’t enough of a similarity for us to worry about.” I was surprised, but very pleased.

            I worked on Ishmael in between drafts of Ladies of Mandrigyn. I remember working on it in that corner study in the Riverside apartment, listening to the wail of the train-whistles from the tracks a few blocks away. That was the novel that taught me, “Do not start boiling eggs in the kitchen and then go back to the typewriter.” I sent it off shortly before I moved back to Ontario, but my memories of the condo in Ontario aren’t as linear: I was extremely isolated and unhappy there, and there was a tremendous amount going on in my life. It’s hard to sort out a timeline. I remember very clearly this enormous, battered brown-paper package of galleys FINALLY showing up on the doorstep of the condo one morning, not long before I moved out, which had to be back in New York in less than a week.

            And I remember being extremely annoyed, because at that point Pocket had had the manuscript for almost two years. It was eighteen months before I even got a copy-edit. For many, many months I heard nothing from them, though during that time I made a special journey down to the Nebula Awards on the Queen Mary to speak to the editor and ask specifically, “You’re SURE doing this cross-over is okay?” I was assured, specifically, that it was. I wrote Dragonsbane – and went through all the re-writes and cutting and re-thinking that book involved – and every now and then something would surface about Ishmael, and I’d have to set Dragonsbane aside and do work on Ish: copyedit, galleys, etc, with LONG periods of inactivity (once over a year) when I figured the book had simply vanished.

            In between all that I started writing cartoons, so there was a LOT of driving back and forth to North Hollywood in my rattly little red car that didn’t have a radio, and going to Michael Reaves’s parties. Because of a warning talk with David Gerrold, I phoned the editor at Pocket a few days before Ishmael went to press (they’d changed editors yet again), to ask in a panic, “Are you SURE this is okay?” and was assured that it really was okay.

            I’m told Ishmael was one of the most popular of the early Trek novels.

            Almost a year after the book appeared (and there was yet another editor in charge of the Trek line), I received a phone call. “Hi. We’re the Simon and Schuster Legal Department. Who told you you could do that?”

            I said, “The editor.” I think I offered to send them a copy of the original, I’ll-rewrite-it letter I’d sent to Editor #1.

            They said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

            That is all that I actually know of my own knowledge.

            Nobody ever told me anything officially. Of course it’s not anything I’d do these days. I acted originally out of ignorance, but I well and truly learned my lesson. Evidently Pocket didn’t hold anything against me, since they took two more Trek novels from me. And of course, editors are far more savvy and careful, having had twenty-plus years of media fandom to deal with.

            I’m told (again, unofficially) that the S&S Legal Department also got a phone call from a fan-writer accusing me of stealing HER idea of having Mr. Spock cross over into Here Come the Brides (like four other fan-writers that I subsequently heard of hadn’t had the same extremely obvious idea). The Legal Department said, “Oh, you mean you were violating Paramount’s licensed characters without permission?” End of that conversation.

            Though it’s a cross-over (with walk-throughs by various other time-and-space travelers in the bar scenes), I wrote it as though the reader had never watched either show: I wanted it to read like a “real novel.” I’m told it does, though Gabriel Garcia Marquez probably does not have anything to worry about. A number of readers have enthused to me about it who clearly had never heard of Here Come the Brides, and Mark Lenard later told me that a copy of it had been passed around among several of the alumni of Brides, to their great amusement.

            It’s still one of my favorite of my own books.