Star Trek Book Review: Mission to Horatius (1968) by Mack Reynolds

“This whole expedition is top secret, and very few persons even at Starfleet Command know that we are on our way…” (35).

Stardate: 3475.3

The first original Star Trek novel ever published, Mission to Horatius, is a quirky little tale that incorporates elements of various original series episodes like “Bread and Circuses,” “The Trouble with Tribbles,” “A Private Little War,” “The Apple,” and “Patterns of Force.” It was published as a young adult novel in 1968 by Whitman Publishing (the same company that published the original run of Gold Key Star Trek comics). For reference, Mission to Horatius hit shelves while the original series was still airing on television, the only full-length novel to be published during the show’s run, though James Blish’s short Bantam adaptations of each episode were collectively published a year earlier beginning in 1967 (co-written with his wife J. A. Lawrence). When Whitman stopped publishing young adult and children’s books in the 1980s, Pocket Books picked up the license for Mission to Horatius and it continued its life in circulation. I was the fortunate beneficiary of a near-mint condition re-published edition of Mission to Horatius, certainly not a great example of Trek literature, but a nice little piece of Trek history all the same.

In Mission to Horatius, The Enterprise has been on continual patrol for over a year –morale is low, supplies are running out, engine nacelles are worn down, and a dangerous bout of cabin fever called “cafard” is spreading. What is cafard? Spock explains it as a mixture of “claustrophobia, ennui –boredom, if you will—and the instinctive dread of a species, born on a planet surface, of living outside its native environment. The instinctive fear of deep space. Formerly the fear of being in free fall, though that seldom applies any longer. A mania that evidently is highly contagious. It is said that in the early days of space travel, cafard could sweep through a ship in a matter of hours, until all on board were raging maniacs…” (16-17). The year before, cafard was found on the “Space Scout Westmoreland” before it promptly killed the whole crew in a murderous outbreak of madness. How exactly does cafard spread among Starfleet crewmen? Answers are never really given. But peppered throughout this book are little anecdotes about life aboard a starship –such as Uhura plucking strings on her lute, or Sulu bringing an exotic rat named “Mickey” aboard the ship (in clear violation of Starfleet rules I might add).      

At any rate, prior to the current mission The Enterprise was en route to Star Base Twelve for some much needed protracted shore leave, but the ship was immediately redirected to Space Station K-Eight to transport emergency supplies before being forced to respond to a subspace distress call from a mysterious location at NGC four hundred, a distant locale which is as far as anyone in the Federation has ever traveled into deep space. It is the edge of known space, neither the Klingons nor the Romulans have traveled beyond it. Upon arrival at this mysterious destination, Kirk is given a directive to open a sealed tape which reveals something unusual: The Enterprise has entered the Horatius system. Named after a legendary Roman hero, the Horatius system has three Class-M planets (Neolithia, Mythra, and Bavarya) and they are all believed to be populated by pilgrims and political dissidents who have rejected life under the Federation.

The task for The Enterprise is to investigate each of these three Class-M planets to find the source of the distress call. First, they visit the rural planet of Neolithia where a landing party is confronted by a “savage” teenage native boy named “Grang of the Wolf clan” who leads them deep into a large radioactive cave in which sensors do not work, and brings them before his culture’s Patriarchs, particularly a leader named Muel, who explain their reason for fleeing to this remote planet: “To flee the large cities that clogged the atmosphere with fumes. To escape the machines that transported men at hundreds, ten thousands of miles an hour, and finally at speeds unbelievable. The gods meant men to walk, or at most to ride upon the four-legged beasts. The gods designed men to eat the food of the fields or the flesh of animals, fresh from the hunters –not to partake of food from tins or frozen foods. Man is not a machine; he should not live among machines” (65). Neolithia (a not-so-veiled reference to the “NeolithicAge”) is populated by romantic luddites, people who have retreated from the modern world. Here, there is an interesting little dialectic in which human technology is criticized for creating such dangerous weaponry as nuclear bombs, to which Kirk responds that men make mistakes but progress must be made because “that species that slows down and stops eventually dies.” However, there is little time for philosophic considerations as faux archers suddenly surround the crew –“Remember, all of you, arrows and pears are quite as effective as the most advanced weapons, so far as terminating life is concerned, if they are given the chance to be used” (54).

Spock exposes this telepathic charade of archers and the landing party is beamed back aboard The Enterprise, where we soon learn that Sulu has once again disobeyed orders and brought aboard the teenage “savage” called Grang. Unfortunately, this portrayal of Sulu as essentially a disobedient child is a big swing and a miss in this novel –the real Sulu would never unleash an exotic rat onto The Enterprise, nor would he willfully violate the Prime Directive (or as it is referred to in this book: “General Order Number One”) by bringing a pre-warp teenager like Grang aboard the ship.

Anyway, the next planet is Mythra, a world filled with small towns akin to Europe in the Middle Ages and run by religious dissidents. A landing party arrives in the central town square where they quickly witness a strange look of “happy bemusement” on everyone’s faces. The landing party watches as a “churl” on the street is happily and carelessly murdered in broad daylight with little care. The crew are brought before Warren, supreme exarch, who has been governing this society under a fiercely theocratic regime. And everyone on Mythra is forced to take an LSD-inspired hallucinogen called “anodyne,” perhaps akin to “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The Mythrians live their lives in praise of the “Ultimate.” As the landing party is forced to return to the ship, they place an antidote to “anodyne” in the Mythran water reservoir system in an effort to free the people and encourage them to rise up against the rule of the “pseudopriests.”

Lastly, The Enterprise visits the planet Bavarya, a world not unlike 20^th century Earth, populated by the ancestors of the “elite Teutonic peoples” (hence the Bavaria allusion). The population of this planet has more than doubled every fifteen years, yet it remains unexpectedly high for being settled less than a century ago by “malcontents” from Earth. After a failed attempt at attacking the Enterprise, a landing party is finally greeted by the All Highest, Nummer Ein. From here, Kirk, Spock, and Grang (from Neolithia) are forced to fight to the death according to the “Code Duello” in a large Coliseum-esque arena (cue Gerald Fried’s iconic “Amok Time” score), however wave after wave of fighters all seem to be the same people reappearing again and again! The crew learns that on Bavarya, there are two classes: the Herr-Elite, who are real people, and the Doppelgangers, who are duplicated clones (their lives are of little value to the Herr-Elite). They also meet Anna Shickle, daughter of Nummer Ein, who was the person who initiated the distress call over concerns about Bavarya’s rising dictatorship. As it turns out Nummer Ein is actually a doppelganger, himself, and the crew finds a central machine which allows them to destroy all five million of the clones, thus terminating the working classes on this planet and ending the dictatorial and piratic activities of the regime… but isn’t this also technically a mass murder? Bones brushes aside any concerns since the clones apparently lack the “spark” that would render them fully human. Admittedly, I’m not so sure how to feel about this conclusion.

And so, with the problems on the three Horatius planets seemingly resolved, the Enterprise departs… but in a silly coda to the story, Sulu’s rat “Mickey” has somehow gotten loose on the ship. Dr. McCoy worries that the rat may, in fact, be carrying the bubonic plague which could kill everyone aboard. The computer library does not have a vaccination for the bubonic plague (for some strange reason), so Kirk orders the entire crew to don space suits while the Enterprise is flushed with poison gas to kill Mickey. Despite every effort to capture or kill Mickey, the rat still turns up alive. That is, until Spock realizes the truth, that Bones has secretly kept Mickey alive in an oxygen tent in order to use him as a form of distraction from the spread of cafard. This silly epilogue offers a fitting end to this first attempt at a Star Trek novel, one which I quite enjoyed far more than expected, but one which is still a fairly clumsy read. I’m sure there are many other Trek books I will recommend ahead of this one.  

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Reynolds, Mack. Mission to Horatius. Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. New York, NY (1999, originally published in 1968). With illustrations by Sparky Moore.

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