James Van Hise

James Van Hise (born 20 December 1949; age 74) was a prolific comic book author and a pop-culture historian who wrote extensively about film, television, and comics in the Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy genres. In the 1970s he created and edited the Star Trek fan magazine Enterprise Incidents; during the 1980s and 1990s, he not only wrote a plethora of reference guides to the Star Trek shows, but to numerous other genre productions as well.

Almost all of his reference works were published by the Schuster & Schuster publishing conglomerate, but there are titles known he had written in part or in whole for third-party publishers. Two of them he did as exclusives for Japanese publishing company Japan Mix, Inc. and of which one was Star Trek-themed, the February 1995 Star Trek Studies title. [1] Japan Mix had the author's name translated to ジェームズ•ヴァン ハイス (="Jēmuzu vu~an haisu") in Japanese script, which in turn re-translates to "James Van Heiss" in Latin script.

In addition to writing about Star Trek, Van Hise also submitted at least one undeveloped story idea for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was titled "Deadworld".

According to Van Hise:

"I wrote the story in 1987 at the behest of a mutual friend of Gerd Oswald. Oswald had directed a couple of Star Trek episodes in the sixties and I'd spoken to him while he was directing an episode of the new Twilight Zone for CBS when I visited that studio in 1986. Oswald was looking for a story he could take to Paramount for The Next Generation which he could attach himself to as the director. He read this outline but rejected it as being 'too depressing.' I told my friend that Gerd, who was then in his seventies, was obviously a man who had never come to terms with his own mortality. Gerd Oswald died two years later of cancer." (Trek: The Next Generation)

Bibliography[]

External links[]

• Author's website at JamesVanHise.com
• James Van Hise biography at PraBook.com