View Single Post
  #50  
Old June 12th 04, 02:22 AM
Scott Hedrick
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


"OM" om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote
in message ...
Mike Ford's _The Final Reflection_.


Whatever happened to him?

...However, something really bad happened to the production side of
Star Trek. TNG came along, and Gene hired a complete and utter dip****
by the name of Richard Arnold to act as his assistant.


Met him. Shook his hand. Washed it repeatedly afterwards.

* Arnold had a major problem with Peter Allen David, whom Arnold felt
was adding way too much satire and humor to Star Trek.


Having met PAD many times, I had a chance to hear his explanation of how we
got "The Rift". Knowing how Arnold acted, PAD submitted three outlines- the
good one, the OK one, and the one with all of the worst aspects of Trek and
a few others thrown in, intentionally creating something so bad even Arnold
wouldn't accept it.

Of course, the plan backfired, PAD wrote the sucky book because of
contractual obligations, and then told Arnold to kiss his LaDonna. After
hearing PAD's explanation as to the exacting requirements implemented under
Arnold- chapers are exactly so many pages, pacing is exactly so, a specific
character must appear x number of times, no matter who the focus is on,
Kirk, Spock and McCoy must have the greatest number of pages because they
are the Important Ones, and so forth, I immediately stopped buying Trek
novels. I suppose I've bought maybe a half-dozen since 1996, and most of
those were PADs.

* Another example is Margaret Wander Bonnanno's butchering of her
original _Probe_ script following STIV. Margie's got it up online at
her website so you can see just how badly the script was raped at
Arnold's insistance. The original novel is far superior to what got
printed.


It smelled of an Arnold "collaboration".

...And there were others, most of whom came forth after Arnold got
ousted following Gene's death in '91.


PAD took delight in saying that, the day after Gene was dropped in the hole,
Arnold was given a box and told he'd be escorted off the property.

But considering Vonda McIntyre's novels
were the biggest piles of printed excrement this side of a certain SRB
conspiracy theorist's own piles, this was obviously no loss at all.


Met her. It carries over to her non-Trek stuff as well. At the *Star Trek
convention*, she stated that she didn't want to talk about Star Trek and was
only going to talk about her newest novel, which was supposed to be some
psycho thriller (are the visions the mass murder is having his imagination,
or are his victims really coming back from the dead for revenge? You decide!
*No, you dumb twit, _you_ are the writer, _you decide_.*).