We round out the 2020 Visions table of contents with a humorous piece by David Gerrold. Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists is a collection of fictional comments placed into a suggestion box on the moon. Over coffee a few months ago, David explained to me that inspiration hit when he read a similar collection of comments by tourists at the Grand Canyon.
It’s short, and it isn’t a story, but I selected this piece because it’s really the only offering in the anthology with the sole intention of getting the reader to laugh. After more than 95,000 words of prognostication, some of it extremely dark, I wanted to close the anthology with something light-hearted. This piece makes a perfect epilogue.
I’ve known David for several years. We met prior to my attending Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp, and for reasons other than our common thread of writing. For anyone who remembers Star Trek as being the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triune, with a U.S.S. Enterprise that had never been destroyed to further the plot, David Gerrold needs no introduction. For the rest of us, here goes.
David broke into television screenwriting with the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles. His best known novels include the Man Who folded Himself, the War with the Chtorr series, and the Starwolf series. His largely biographical novelette The Martian Child won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and was adapted to film (with the obligatory Hollywood changes) and released in 2007. The film starred John Cusack.
David is a better person than he is a writer, and he is one hell of a writer. Aside from his adoption of a son and dedication to raising him at the cost of great personal and career sacrifice, much of which is chronicled in The Martian Child, he is extremely active in charity work. I am very privileged to call him a friend, and excited to include his work in one of my projects.