In honor of our 9-days-and-counting* to either being fully funded or fully irritated that we weren’t fully funded for our speculative fiction, alternate universe book of Beatles short stories, Across the Universe, I have decided to spotlight one of our already-committed authors each day. All of our authors should be committed, but one at a time, please.

Meanwhile, here’s our Kickstarter link! Back us now, before you miss out!

*Math was never my strong suit. I thought we were 9 days as of yesterday; turns out today is the 9th-and-counting day. Fortunately, this bothers nobody but me.

9 Extremely Fuzzy Reasons to Admire David Gerrold, Some of Which I May Have Made Up

1. David Gerrold may have a beard, but does not appear to be inherently fuzzy. In fact, according to possibly unreliable sources, he was denied a role on Star Trek once for being too thin. (This was rectified later on Deep Space Nine.)
2. Of the many millions of words Gerrold has likely written since he began editing and publishing in the 1970s, he is most famous for one in particular: Tribbles. He’s the man who gave us “The Trouble with Tribbles,” from the original Trek series. (But you probably knew that.)
3. That was far from the only Trek episode he was ever involved in, and a large swathe of Gerrold’s career is a great big fuzzy hug to the entire Trek universe. This is not how he would likely characterize it.
4. Gerrold is contributing an as-yet-unnamed tale to our “Across the Universe” book, in which “The Beatles have been launched into space, affected by gamma radiation and they come back as the Fantastic Four.” Dare we say, the Fab Fantastic Four. We already have a Thing for this story. The Thing is not actually very fuzzy either, but the joke was there.
5. When asked to lend a hand to make sure the entire universe knew about “Across the Universe,” Gerrold stepped up to provide a total of six Tuckerizations for his story. As of this writing, four are left! That’s pretty … Fantastic and Fab!
6. On an entirely personal note, as an adoptee myself, I feel particularly warm and fuzzy about parents who adopt, and Gerrold is one such man. As Gerrold told File 770 in 2017, “[I]f I hadn’t adopted Sean, I probably could have written another dozen books, but they wouldn’t have been as good, and I wouldn’t have learned how to be a better person. I learned as much from Sean as he learned from me.”
7. Have we mentioned that Gerrold is a predictive genius? Not only was he one of the first to describe a fictional computer virus in 1972’s When HARLIE Was One, he also had a pretty solid sense for what smartphones would look like in 1999 — and he thought they should be called a Personal Information Telecommunications Agent, or PITA, or “pain in the ass.”
8. His Hugo and Nebula Award winning semi-autobiographical novelette “The Martian Child” was adapted into a 2007 film starring the cuddliest of all Gen-X actors, John Cusack. We are mentally holding up a boombox playing Peter Gabriel at Mr. Gerrold for this.
9. David Gerrold allegedly runs a Tribble farm in his backyard, but you can only find out the truth if you co-edit an anthology with one of his stories. So for all the noodly tentacles in the universe, throw some money at Kickstarter — I’m dying to find out!

Convinced? Back us now and find out just how awesome this anthology is gonna be. Plus, you get a book out of it!