For all the talk about Gene Roddenberry’s vision, I think we are unaware of how terrible Star Trek could have been had Gene been left in sole charge of it. I’ve started referring lately to the fact that the two things Gene thought we’d have left behind by the twenty-third century were interpersonal conflict and zippers, and that is depressingly true. Without people like D. C. Fontana, we would not have the Star Trek we know and love, and she does not get enough credit for how much she’s shaped our perceptions of it.
She did a little writing before Star Trek, but she got her start as a typist. Indeed, her first work for Roddenberry was as a temp when his secretary was out sick. He is said to be the one who got her to stop putting her first name, Dorothy, on her scripts, as he knew that the studios were biased against female writers. She’d been writing since she was eleven, and I am intrigued by some of the work she apparently did. Wikipedia mentions a script that was limited to four speaking roles and one where all the outdoor action had to be rewritten due to rain. These are the kinds of challenges that build a writer.
She didn’t write a lot of Star Trek episodes, but Leonard Nimoy credited her with shaping the vision of Vulcans. She created Sarek, for one thing. She wrote several episodes dealing with Klingons and several dealing with Romulans. She managed to get through Roddenberry’s views to develop some challenges, something beyond his set ideas on how they could only fight energy clouds or whatever into letting them actually fight each other.
She probably would be even better known if she were male, and that’s a fact we have to face. She had to fight for everything. She was the story editor on Star Trek, from right about the time the show went on the air, but she had to prove herself—to stop being Roddenberry’s secretary. Which was the position she held before then, even though she was already writing for the show. I don’t know if her IMDb page lists all the episodes she worked on, especially not the ones she did under a pseudonym. And her producing was a constant fight.
Part of it, of course, is that we also undervalue writers. How many screenwriters can the average person name who are not also directors? And of course there’s the genre ghetto; Fontana doesn’t exclusively write science fiction, but her work in Westerns isn’t in a more respected genre. Still, the existence of as many well-developed female characters as there are in Star Trek starts with D. C. Fontana. For that alone, she deserves recognition.
