[WT Sharpe]

I finished reading The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay by Harlan Ellison, and posted the following review on Goodreads: "The City on the Edge of Forever" has long been my favorite episode of the original Star Trek TV series. I was unaware, however, of the controversy surrounding this episode. It seems the author, Harlan Ellison, was not at all pleased by the changes Gene Roddenberry insisted on, and it ignited an intense and bitter feud that was to last decades. This book contains the original teleplay, unaltered, just as Ellison intended. It's different, and extremely good, although I don't know if it would have been a fitting episode as written for Star Trek. The afterwords by cast members (Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei) are warm but non-committal as concerns the controversy, although other afterwords by others connected to the Star Trek universe seem to back up Ellison's version of events. William Shatner--who was portrayed by Ellison as a brown-nosing, two-faced, false friend--is nowhere to be be found among the afterwards. Gene Roddenberry--who is portrayed here as a lying, scheming, megalomanic with no writing ability--was deceased by the time this book came out. Has the truth come out at long last, or is this simply an angry rant by a very talented but unstable author with a temper on overdrive?