By Captain Pyke | September 7, 2010 - 10:04 pm

Star Trek: The Original Series writer David Gerrold is scheduled to make a special appearance at Star Trek: The Exhibition Saturday, September 18th in Riverside, CA. Gerrold, best know for writing the iconic "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode, will be the guest speaker at the 3 hour event starting at 1pm. The special event will include a presentation, where Gerald will field questions from the audience, as well as a reception, and book signing. The event will be free with general admission, pre-sale tickets are available for purchase through the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.

Gerrold wrote the scripts for the original series' "The Trouble with Tribbles" and its sequel, the animated series' "More Tribbles, More Troubles", as well as The Animated Series episode "Bem". The first of these was nominated for a Hugo Award. He provided the story, along with Oliver Crawford, for TOS: "The Cloud Minders". He also provided an uncredited rewrite of the final draft of the script for TOS: "I, Mudd".

Before his script outline that became "The Trouble With Tribbles" was bought by Star Trek producers, Gerrold (a recent college graduate), early in 1967, submitted a sixty-page outline for a two-part episode, "Tomorrow Was Yesterday". After that outline was responded to, positive for its quality, negative for its usefulness to the series, Gerrold was invited to submit some script outlines suitable for the program's budget. Gerrold submitted five outlines, including "A Fuzzy Thing Happened To Me..." (which became Tribbles), "The Protracted Man", "Bandi", and two others with titles Gerrold did not recall some years later. One of the others involved Kirk playing a chess game with his crew as chess pieces, the other involved a spaceship-destroying machine, an idea he noted as eerily similar to Norman Spinrad's story "The Doomsday Machine" that was produced for the same season. Gerrold also came up with both "More Tribbles, More Troubles" and "Bem" as story ideas for the third season, however producer Fred Freiberger refused to buy either of them. They were re-developed and produced for the The Animated Series five years later.

In 1987, Gerrold was hired as a story editor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which capacity he wrote many elements in the Writers' Bible for the series. He left the show near the end of the first season, mainly because of the dispute over his controversial script, Blood and Fire. The story, which was basically an allegory of AIDS, and involved allegedly homosexual characters, was initially scrapped by the producers. It was re-written by Herb Wright as Blood and Ice, removing the gay characters, but it still remained unproduced.

More recently, Gerrold wrote and directed the fan-made internet series Star Trek: New Voyages episode "Blood and Fire" (2007), which features James Cawley, John Carrigan, Denise Crosby, and Bill Blair. It is a re-working of his "Star Wolf" book Blood and Fire (itself, a re-working of the aforementioned story he originally wrote for TNG). Another episode, a further sequel to "The Trouble with Tribbles", is planned. (source Memory Alpha)

Also on the calendar for September 18th, the Riverside Metropolitan Museum will be host to select Star Trek Memorabilia from the UCR Eaton Collection - the world’s largest publicly accessible collection of sci-fi works. And, immediately following the David Gerrold reception, the museum will be hosting a special Ferengi themed happy hour with deserts and a DJ.

For more information and tickets, check out the Riverside Metropolitan Museum website here.