I came to Forbidden Planet the long way around. I was a Trekkie first. Then one day I watched a film from 1956 and sat there about four minutes into it recognizing things.
A saucer, crewed by a service rather than an expedition. A commander, a ship's doctor, a chief engineer. Uniforms. A landing party. A machine that keeps house. This was Star Trek, ten years early. Years after that I read how directly the film had worked on Gene Roddenberry, and that settled it. I had to bring the two of them together, and tell the rest of the story while I was there.
And of course Forbidden Planet has parents of its own. It is The Tempest, more or less openly: the exiled scholar on his island, his daughter who has never seen another man, the servant who does the work, the sailors who come ashore and set everything moving. Shakespeare had a monster too.
I wanted to go back to that island. What I did not want was a retelling. The film is a fine piece of work and does not need me to improve it. What I wanted was the part it left out.
Three things in particular.
The first is Julia Morbius. In the film the wife is a line of dialogue. She died, we are told, in the first year, and the story moves on. That always struck me as a waste, because a man like Edward Morbius does not become what he becomes without somebody standing next to him telling him what is happening to him and being ignored. So I gave her six years, and a voice, and a good many of the best lines in this book.
The second is Robby. In the film the robot is a marvel and a mascot. He hands out drinks, he makes dresses, he short circuits rather than do harm, and everybody finds him charming, including me. But nobody in that film ever asks him anything. Nobody asks him what he wants, or what he remembers, or whether he agrees. I decided to let somebody ask.
The third is Altaira. The film gives her a father, a tiger, and a romance. I wanted to know what nineteen years alone with one man and one machine actually does to a person, and what it would take for her to open a door.
The Star Trek side was its own pleasure. Once you decide the Krell seeded other worlds, Exo III is sitting right there waiting, and so is Flint, and so is the question of what a Starfleet captain does when his orders and his conscience point in different directions. Kirk has been answering that question since 1966. I thought he should answer it on the planet where it all started.
This book is fan fiction and nothing else. It is not authorized, it is not for sale, and it is not endorsed by anybody. Star Trek belongs to CBS Studios and Paramount, and Forbidden Planet belongs to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and I am grateful to the people who made both, who are the only reason this exists. If anything in here sends you back to the originals, that is the best outcome I could hope for.
David Moss
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
