Writer: Mack Reynolds
Illustrator: Sparky Moore
Licensing tie-in rights are interesting beasts. In January of 1967, Bantam Books published Star Trek by James Blish, a collection of short story adaptations of episodes 6-13 of the series. The follow-up, Star Trek 2, also by Blish, was published in February of 1968 and featured adaptations of episodes 15, 19, 21, 23-24, 28 and 29. Later, Ballantine Books published The Making of Star Trek in September of 1968, a non-fiction behind the scenes look at the series. Meanwhile, Gold Key Comics were publishing their Star Trek tie-in comic book series. That these licensing rights were spread over different publishing houses is not unusual -- clearly Ballantine had nonfiction rights, Bantam had "adult fiction" rights, and Gold Key's corporate owner, Whitman publishing, had "children's fiction" rights.
Which brings us to Mission to Horatius, the first piece of original Star Trek prose fiction ever published. Published as it was by Whitman, this novel is strictly in the "young adult" category. I'm not quite sure how juvenile works are classified these days, but when I was a kid I think this would have been percieved as what children call a "chapter book" -- meant for kids around grades 3 to 6, with chapters and decent prose but simple stories and still containing illustrations, usually one per chapter.
Now, I don't like to look down on books just because they are for kids. There are plenty of great examples of children's fiction that don't condescend to their readers and feature fine stories. And despite its adult pretensions, Star Trek has always been a perfect starter sci-fi franchise for kids as well. Also, by February 1968 I would expect a piece of tie-in fiction to have more information to work with about the show than that Gold Key comic I reviewed did, and after all Mack Reynolds is an established sci-fi writer as well. So I didn't want to go into this novel assuming it would be bad.
But it is. Real bad. In fact, by the end of it I was pretty angry at the thing. I actually think it's worse than the Gold Key issue, because it's clear that Reynolds had access to the Writer's Guide for the show and had even seen episodes. The comic book was so different it was practically it's own thing, but the novel is close to the show while getting so many things wrong along the way.
Now, I don't know as much of the early history of Star Trek fanzines and fanfics as I probably should (pretty much all the conventions and quirks of fanfic come from Trek fanfic), but I'll say that my first impression reading Mission to Horatius is that it reads like the kind of Trek fanfic I wrote when I was say 10-15 years old. The kind where you throw in a lot of extraneous extra lore to prove you're a true fan, where you introduce character by full name, rank and position, and where everyone acts like caricatures of themselves because you're so eager to get Spock to say "Fascinating", or McCoy to say "Dammit, Jim!" or Scotty to moan about the engines in a story you wrote!
Reynolds writes like he had a copy of the Writer's Guide beside him and couldn't wait to show off. The book contains the kind of worst sci-fi tell-not-show that the TV series often avoided -- characters explaining how warp drive works to each other for two pages kind of stuff. Things that should have just been in narration are in dialogue, as every time something happens every bridge officer gets a line of dialogue to comment on it.
And it doesn't help that between the fact that the characters are two-dimensional renditions, that Reynolds doesn't have the charm of the actors to help him, and that they are constantly talking and interrupting each other that everyone comes off as an unlikeable asshole. Kirk "snaps" at his officers constantly, Sulu and Chekov are utterly irresponsible junior officers, McCoy is in full grump mode all the time. Reynolds does a recurring bit where Kirk tries to get one of his officers to report something to him and they stall and he has to ask over and over, as if you were watching an entire Star Trek episode scripted like the end gag in "Trouble with Tribbles". It gets very aggravating.
And Spock. Oh man, Spock. If the exposition in this book was like Reynolds showing off that he had a copy of the Writer's Guide, Spock is Reynolds showing off that he got suckered into buying a home encyclopedia set. At every mention of any proper noun, Spock starts reciting rote facts and dates on the topic for at least two paragraphs each time before someone shuts him up. Maybe this was supposed to be educational?
Additionally, everyone in the book is an idiot. Kirk seems to be the only person who knows the Prime Directive, and is constantly reminded his officers about it, who are constantly violating it. Which feels like a reversal of the show, really. Characters establish information and then half a chapter later are confused or mystified by things they themselves had earlier explained.
The plot drives me mad. The jist of it is that the Enterprise has received a distress signal from the Horatius system, which has three planets, each colonized by a different group of humans who did not want to live in the Federation. They don't know which has sent the signal or why. The first one, Neolithia, Spock explains was colonized by people who rejected technology and wanted to get back to nature. Yet when the ship goes into orbit, the book spends pages and pages on the characters scanning the planet, not finding any signs of technology or civilization, being baffled, beaming down to figure out the mystery, and being attacked by nature boys doing the cave man schtick and being amazed by it all. This is what I mean when I say the characters are stupid.
Now, I know it's a kid's book, and the plot should be simple. I'm not saying these mysteries should be apparent to the kids, but it should be apparent to the characters. The story should be simplified, not their intelligence. Giving the answer to a riddle before asking it doesn't make anyone look good.
Then Sulu and Chekov decide to violate the Prime Directive by beaming one of the native kids onboard when Kirk explicitly told them not to, and once he knows he's onboard? Oh, let's give him a tour of the ship, a haircut and a uniform! Yeesh!
The second planet is a religious colony, where of course the priests are corrupt and drugging the population into subserviance, like in "Return of the Archons". Now and again this book for children sneaks an assumed "Midcentury Western Christian Imperialist" view of other cultures that seems at odds with Star Trek's secular humanism -- for example Kirk calls Neolithia a backwards retarded culture. When the priests of the second world, Mythra, turn out to be a sham and the religion just a big power grab, Spock explains for the benefit of Chekov of all people that religions are not always as peaceful and benign as the traditions of Jesus of Nazereth -- as if Christianity is the assumed standard in the Federation to the point where other traditions are utterly unknown.
Speaking of assumptions, Reynolds also does something throughout the book that drove me up the wall -- he refers to Earth Basic as being the language spoken. Now, this is a common sci-fi/fantasy trope, to call what is ostensibly "English" something else because English shouldn't exist in that world -- for example, English is called Basic in Star Wars, and Common in Dungeons & Dragons, Westron in Lord of the Rings, etc. But Star Trek is just our world in the future! They are speaking English!
*Ahem* Anyways, the third planet is called Bavarya, and apparently is full of political dissidents. And this is about where I lost it with this book. So everyone on the planet dresses in these militaristic uniforms and use German officer ranks to address each other and oh yeah the lower classes all look alike and are even referred to as Doppelgangers and have blonde hair and blue eyes and its a dictatorship AND IT TAKES FOREVER FOR KIRK & CO. TO REALIZE THIS A SOCIETY OF GENETICALLY ENGINEERED NAZI CLONES!!! They are explicitly drawn as Nazis in the illustrations, and Spock, who has spent the whole book explaining the history of everything, doesn't even flinch at the word Doppelganger, which Kirk just assumes is this world's cultural term for second class citizens, and they all scratch their heads about them all looking the same and no one ties together the uniforms and the German words and phrases at all. Like, this crew just doesn't know what Nazis, clones, or the German language are. And again, I get that like, maybe there should be a mystery for kids reading the book to put together, but it makes the characters look like idiots not to figure this out, particularly with the way Spock has been portrayed up to this point. He can rattle off the history of who "Horatius" is in myth, but he's unfamiliar with FUCKING NAZIS??
Anyways, turns out the dictator's daughter is the one who sent out the distress signal, and that it's ludicrously easy to kill all the clones (which it's okay to do because the book spends an entire page with McCoy explaining it's impossible to clone a soul and therefore the Doppelgangers are zombies, because again Inexplicable Christian Agenda) by hitting a single button in a control room and without the clones the Nazis lose power over the people and so hooray Nazis defeated!
There's a bunch of other stupid shit in this book, like a subplot about how the ship hasn't been in for R&R or repairs for a year (what?) and this is making the whole crew go space mad from space boredom because y'know they don't have an exciting adventure every fucking week Friday nights at 8:30! And Sulu's pet rat that gets loose and apparently in the future a) rats are more or less extinct and b) everyone's forgotten about the Bubonic Plague! (Again, Spock is a huge know-it-all except when convenient).
But the main thing I wanna talk about is this: Why does this book feel like three Star Trek TV adventures stitched together? We go to a caveman planet, a religious nutjob planet, and a Nazi planet. These are all the kind of cheap, easy premises the show liked to do. In fact -- they DID a Nazi planet episode for real (and the characters in that knew what Nazis were)! In a novel, you could do things with Star Trek too expensive for television, take the premise anywhere, and yet we're left with the equivalent of cheap backlot sets, just in our imagination.
The fact that a Nazi planet is used makes me wonder when the book was written. Because Reynolds not only obviously had the Writer's Guide (since his character descriptions are so pulled from it), but he had clearly seen the show! The characters may be exaggerated, but they are still recognizable, and Reynolds mentions specific episodes, like "Trouble with Tribbles", which aired earlier in the same season as "Patterns of Force", the Nazi episode! Now, Memory Alpha (the Star Trek wiki), says the book came out in February, so after "Tribbles" aired but before "Patterns" -- but there's another wrinkle in this mystery! In one sequence, the crew has to don spacesuits. Now, spacesuits wouldn't appear on Trek until season three, so the illustrator has them wearing the spacesuits from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film which wouldn't see release until April. I can only conclude publicity materials from this major film release showed the suits appearances in time for the illustrator to use them -- because otherwise why would you write a Trek novel about a Nazi planet when the show had already done it?
Mission to Horatius isn't bad because it's for kids, or because it's a tie-in novel, or because it even gets much wrong about Star Trek in terms of lore or character. It's bad because it's poorly written, and aggravating to read at every turn. It's a curiousity, but not something I can recommend.
Rating: 1 out of 4
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