This post begins: The June 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction had a cornerstone tale of Science Fiction with Fredric Brown’s “Arena”. Rather foolishly it didn’t get the cover. Instead Murray Leinster’s “Trog” did with an uninspired shot of a ship’s propeller. (John, what were you thinking? Probably didn’t want people to think ASF was that trashy Pulp SF.) All is forgiven when you get inside the issue and read “Arena” with its A. Williams illustrations.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.
In a direct line from Arena is May 1948 ASF ‘The Rull’ by A E Van Vogt. He later changed the story to fit it into ‘The War against the Rull’, a fix up novelisation of several short stories. Then a long time after that 1979 we had Barry Longyear’s ‘Enemy Mine’ in Asimovs. However maybe they all started with ‘Brown on Resolution’ by CS Forester from 1929.
I had thought of Enemy Mine and had wondered if I should mention it. Mostly because Longyear flips the script, making the alien more advanced philosophically than the human. Something Orson Scott Card did at the end of “Ender’s Game”. Ultimately, there were just too many to mention….
The one thing I’ve not yet seen is whether Brown had anything to do with the adaptation used on STAR TREK other than having written the original story in the 1940s. He died in 1972 so he was still around in 1967.
I doubt he did. He was pretty reclusive, living in Taos, New Mexico.
According to Wikipedia the ST screenplay was written without any conscious knowledge of the Brown story–Legal bought the rights to avoid any problems.
The Trek folks claim they wrote their script independently and someone only noticed the similarities later (pre production) so they secured the rights after having the script written.