Peter David’s 1992 novel “Imzadi” holds a distinction no other Star Trek tie-in book can claim. Harlan Ellison, the notoriously litigious writer behind “The City on the Edge of Forever,” personally signed off on it before a word was written, and he kept it out of his decades-long war with Paramount over royalties, all because Peter David called him first and asked.
That courtesy did not have to happen. When a writer scripts an episode of television, the standard deal is work for hire. The studio owns the characters, the concepts, and everything that spins out of them afterward. The writer gets a check and, if they’re lucky, a residual. Peter David owed Harlan Ellison nothing under that arrangement. He asked anyway, because the two men were friends, and because “Imzadi” was built directly on top of the time-travel device Ellison invented for “City”: the Guardian of Forever.
