Inspiration
David Gerrold, in The Trouble With Tribbles: the Birth, Sale, and Final Production of One Episode mentions that after the episode was aired, people asked him if tribbles were inspired by the flat cats of Robert A. Heinlein's novel, The Rolling Stones, which are a similar small, fuzzy creature.
- Look — I thought I was telling the “rabbits in Australia” story. When rabbits were introduced to Australia, they multiplied at an incredible rate because there were no predators or natural enemies to keep them in control. It was an ecology story — and a spaceship is the perfect setting for it because a spaceship must be a balanced ecology.
- When it came to designing the creatures though, I had to be simple — they had to be easy to build; they had to be cheap, and they had to be believable. We wouldn’t want to use rabbits for the story — we wanted something … well, gimmicky. We needed a science fiction animal. …
- I had to think — what would be easy?
- Holly ... Sherman had a key ring attached to a ball of pink fuzz. The more I looked at it, the more obvious it became. ...The ease with which a fluff ball could be manufactured made it a natural candidate.
The concept is an old one that predates even the Heinlein novel, since it is central to the story "Pigs Is Pigs", which was very popular from its first publication in 1905 and beyond.
The name for the creatures was originally "fuzzies", but in order to avoid confusion with the H. Beam Piper novel Little Fuzzy, Gerrold brainstormed some nonsense words, arriving at "tribble" almost at random.
Read more about this topic: Tribble
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)