Biography for
David Gerrold More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

24 January 1944

Birth Name

Jerrold Friedman

Trivia

Wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles", the most-popular episode of "Star Trek" (1966)

In 1992, Gerrold adopted an 8-year-old boy named Sean.

Guest of honor at WESTERCON 28 science-fiction convention (Oakland, CA, July 3-6, 1975).

Wrote a syndicated column for "Starlog" magazine in the 70's and 80's.

Personal Quotes

'Real drama' is about the human condition; it's about angst, anguish, suicide, incest. It's about people failing to put their lives together. Science-fiction is about what do we build next. (It) gets into what is the nature of reality, what does it mean to be a human being. Those are answers you don't get in an ordinary story.

No, I did not get the idea for the 'War Against The Chtorr' series when my dog got worms. Here's the truth. When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of War Of The Worlds, Them, and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Those movies were SCARY! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary. I wanted to write about some kind of biological invasion from space, and if you read the series you'll see that I've got giant insects who dig deep nests; but the big insight occurred while sitting and schmoozing with some writer and artist friends at the Boskone convention in Feb. of 1970. That's when I realized that you don't invade a planet, you COLONIZE it. You terraform it. You take all of your support species with you -- dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, horses, cows, pigs, wheat, corn, carrots, broccoli, apples, bananas, honeybees, lizards, frogs, fish, etc., because there are all these complex interactions necessary for survival. (Then I had to figure out how to send a whole ecology from there to here, but that's another conversation.) But as it grew, I realized that the story was never really about the worms at all; it's about all of the other creatures in the ecology. The focus on the worms was one of the distractions that kept our heroes from realizing what they were really up against for the first three or four books. BTW, the dog is fine, thanks!