Let me just start by saying something I forgot to mention in my earlier preamble to his blog: I'm not going to be bothering with novelizations of movies and TV episodes, several of which precede Mission To Horatius. Not because those are never good or relevant (just check out Matt Stover's fantastic novelization of Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith for an example of a novelization done right (then read all his other Star Wars books - he really is the best)), but because I've got like a million bajillion novels to read already and something's gotta give, dammit.
I admit I am curious, though, especially about the Original Series and Animated Series adaptations (even if many of them were written by Alan Dean Foster - a writer who's been boring for nearly half a century now), since the confines of television in the 60s and 70s didn't allow for much complexity when it came to the kind of heavier intellectual considerations that were to be found in sci-fi literature.
But for now, I'll have to be content to read between the lines, and try to decipher deeper meaning from the early episodes by how they're referred to in original works. I've found that TOS novels tend to fixate on 1-3 episodes in particular when it comes to references to the show, rather than attempt to accommodate every single episode (which would probably require establishing a firm timeline of events, which even the most diligent Trekkers and Trekkies are still struggling to do). This has the effect of making individual novels sometimes function as a direct or indirect sequel to an episode or story arc from the show, tying up loose ends and expanding on its larger consequences within the Star Trek universe.
In any event, Mission To Horatius will never be counted among the more thought-out or intellectual Trek novels, being basically a children's book (complete with coloring book-grade illustrations by someone hilariously named Sparky Moore) with an extremely predictable bare-bones plot whose primary purpose seems to be teaching the "young adults" toward whom the book was marketed the meaning of the word "cafard." It also begins what quickly becomes an incredibly tiresome tradition in Trek novels: establishing at the very top of the story that the Enterprise is in rough shape, with crew members not having seen shore leave in months, supplies running low and technical problems abounding. Maybe a lot of the writers were sick of the TV Enterprise always running smoothly at the beginning and end of every episode, and wanted to subvert that?
There is, in fact, something of a weird prevalence for 'hive mind' writing happening, at least in the novels of the 70s and early 80s, where there will be two or more books with recurring themes coming out back-to-back: two or three 'artificial planet with a complex society' books, then two or three 'Enterprise encounters intelligent cat people,' followed by/intermixed with several books that highlight one of the less prominent members of the regular crew (Chekov, Sulu and Uhura are particular favorites in this category).
Mission To Horatius plays it pretty straight, however, with Kirk, Spock and McCoy guiding us through a very color-by-numbers investigation of a distress signal sent from the eponymous Horatius system, which has three non-allied inhabited worlds, and they basically have to find out which planet is the evil one (hint: it's probably gonna be the one inhabited by space Germans, same as always).
Running parallel to this is McCoy's attempt to fight the aforementioned space cafard, a plot that is, anticlimactically enough, resolved after the space nazis have been stopped in their tracks in a confrontation that is equal parts confusing and simplistic, somehow. The cafard resolution, meanwhile, is very much in line with the ba-dum-tiss punchline jokes often featured at the end of TOS and TAS episodes, and one can't quite shake the feeling that Reynolds would have preferred to focus on just one of the storylines, with the other forced upon him by Whitman Publishing, who would never again publish a Trek book.
While it does indeed feature the intriguing ideas and enlightening premises that has always made Star Trek so great, Horatius is still significantly hampered by its childish tone, so much so that I would deem reading it mostly a waste of time (unless you can find a print version and crayon in those sweet line drawings). While it can hardly be blamed for reading like what it is - a kid's book - and its plot, while contrived, is no more stupid than the more asinine of the Trek TV episodes and movies, I still feel there's always room for a little more thought and character, and I personally found Mission To Horatius lacking beyond the point of excusability.
Bottom line: is it a waste of time? Yes, almost totally. Reynolds has probably already taken a lot of smack from Trek fans for inadvertently starting getting the Star Trek book party started with a hollow 'glonk' rather than the explosive bang it should've, and I feel bad about adding to that echo chamber, but the fact remains that this book is not very good.
Next up: we jump ahead to 1970, when episode novelization guru James Blish has his first stab at an original Star Trek work, Spock Must Die! with considerably better dividends.
I admit I am curious, though, especially about the Original Series and Animated Series adaptations (even if many of them were written by Alan Dean Foster - a writer who's been boring for nearly half a century now), since the confines of television in the 60s and 70s didn't allow for much complexity when it came to the kind of heavier intellectual considerations that were to be found in sci-fi literature.
But for now, I'll have to be content to read between the lines, and try to decipher deeper meaning from the early episodes by how they're referred to in original works. I've found that TOS novels tend to fixate on 1-3 episodes in particular when it comes to references to the show, rather than attempt to accommodate every single episode (which would probably require establishing a firm timeline of events, which even the most diligent Trekkers and Trekkies are still struggling to do). This has the effect of making individual novels sometimes function as a direct or indirect sequel to an episode or story arc from the show, tying up loose ends and expanding on its larger consequences within the Star Trek universe.
In any event, Mission To Horatius will never be counted among the more thought-out or intellectual Trek novels, being basically a children's book (complete with coloring book-grade illustrations by someone hilariously named Sparky Moore) with an extremely predictable bare-bones plot whose primary purpose seems to be teaching the "young adults" toward whom the book was marketed the meaning of the word "cafard." It also begins what quickly becomes an incredibly tiresome tradition in Trek novels: establishing at the very top of the story that the Enterprise is in rough shape, with crew members not having seen shore leave in months, supplies running low and technical problems abounding. Maybe a lot of the writers were sick of the TV Enterprise always running smoothly at the beginning and end of every episode, and wanted to subvert that?
There is, in fact, something of a weird prevalence for 'hive mind' writing happening, at least in the novels of the 70s and early 80s, where there will be two or more books with recurring themes coming out back-to-back: two or three 'artificial planet with a complex society' books, then two or three 'Enterprise encounters intelligent cat people,' followed by/intermixed with several books that highlight one of the less prominent members of the regular crew (Chekov, Sulu and Uhura are particular favorites in this category).
Mission To Horatius plays it pretty straight, however, with Kirk, Spock and McCoy guiding us through a very color-by-numbers investigation of a distress signal sent from the eponymous Horatius system, which has three non-allied inhabited worlds, and they basically have to find out which planet is the evil one (hint: it's probably gonna be the one inhabited by space Germans, same as always).
Running parallel to this is McCoy's attempt to fight the aforementioned space cafard, a plot that is, anticlimactically enough, resolved after the space nazis have been stopped in their tracks in a confrontation that is equal parts confusing and simplistic, somehow. The cafard resolution, meanwhile, is very much in line with the ba-dum-tiss punchline jokes often featured at the end of TOS and TAS episodes, and one can't quite shake the feeling that Reynolds would have preferred to focus on just one of the storylines, with the other forced upon him by Whitman Publishing, who would never again publish a Trek book.
While it does indeed feature the intriguing ideas and enlightening premises that has always made Star Trek so great, Horatius is still significantly hampered by its childish tone, so much so that I would deem reading it mostly a waste of time (unless you can find a print version and crayon in those sweet line drawings). While it can hardly be blamed for reading like what it is - a kid's book - and its plot, while contrived, is no more stupid than the more asinine of the Trek TV episodes and movies, I still feel there's always room for a little more thought and character, and I personally found Mission To Horatius lacking beyond the point of excusability.
Bottom line: is it a waste of time? Yes, almost totally. Reynolds has probably already taken a lot of smack from Trek fans for inadvertently starting getting the Star Trek book party started with a hollow 'glonk' rather than the explosive bang it should've, and I feel bad about adding to that echo chamber, but the fact remains that this book is not very good.
Next up: we jump ahead to 1970, when episode novelization guru James Blish has his first stab at an original Star Trek work, Spock Must Die! with considerably better dividends.
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