“It wasn’t our first officer who was prowling the ship the night before last. It was the Messiah!”
Stardate: 6720.8
An early example of the “Spocks-ploitation” genre of Star Trek literature, Spock, Messiah! was the second adult Star Trek novel to be published following James Blish’s Spock Must Die! in 1970. However, after James Blish’s untimely passing in 1975, the task of writing new Bantam Star Trek novels fell to Frederik Pohl (then editor of Bantam Books) who hired Theodore Cogswell and Charles Spano Jr. to “Get them off the damned ship!” Thus, with the 1973 oil crisis fresh on the public’s mind (and perhaps the 1965 publication of Dune), Spano drafted a Star Trek novel about a fanatical desert leader; Cogswell made various edits and revisions before the final book was submitted to Pohl for edits and publication.
The Enterprise is in its eighth day of orbit around Kyros (a Class-M planet), and after three days of a survey team down on the planet, per Dr. McCoy, the initial trials of a new technology known as “cephalic implants” devised by Starfleet Cultural Survey Bureau have been generally successful (or so it seems). The “cephalic implants” apparently allow crew members to adopt a particular personality as well as certain cultural knowledge and characteristics of a native population. With this technology, the crew can anonymously beam down to a pre-warp planet without violating the Prime Directive (or as it’s referred to in this novel, “general order one”). It allows for perfect mimicry of native behavior and the molding of a mind with a particular person on the planet, all while theoretically maintaining control over themselves. What could go wrong? Suffice it to say, the technology seems highly questionable at best –some team members start complaining of feeling disoriented after first being linked to the Kyrosian minds, yet still Dr. McCoy is confident that once each team member realizes he or she can consciously control the feelings of a personality intrusion caused by the link, complaints of feeling like two different people will cease.
Kirk and Scotty are just about to retire with Sulu at the con when suddenly the scanners pick up a radiation wave headed right for the ship (presumably from a nearby black hole). Meanwhile, Spock’s implant starts giving him trouble (and there are other reports of problems – one crew member can’t stop pick-pocketing, the other can’t keep her hands off men despite being a notorious prude).
As Dr. McCoy says: “I must admit to feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing, in spite of all the information we’ve acquired. The bright boys at Starfleet are always cooking up gadgets that violate a person’s physical integrity. Having my atoms scrambled every time I go through that damn transporter is bad enough, but hooking one man’s nervous system to another’s with electronic widgets… Be only a matter of time before we’re all literally worshipping a transistor, or some bloody thing…” (14).
By now, Spock is lost on Kyros. He has not reported in to the Enterprise for over a day, and with time running out, a landing party is organized to track down Spock before the incoming radiation cloud can destroy the Enterprise.
Soon, Kirk and crew are horrified to learn that something has gone horribly wrong with Spock’s “dop” implant –Spock’s originally intended dop was inexplicably swapped out (thanks to Ensign George’s own malfunctioning dop which gave her a heightened sexual attraction to Spock) and Spock is now living out a delusion on Kyros as a tribal “Messiah” wherein he plans to purge the planet on behalf of the gods. His personality profile in his implant was mistakenly Chag Gara (perhaps a play on the name “Che Guevara”), a 43-year-old hill clan leader who believes he has been chosen by the gods to unify Kyros’s city-states under a single theocratic regime. This poses a serious problem for the Enterprise –how will they revive Spock without violating the Prime Directive before the radiation cloud arrives?
“In a warped way, Spock is a whole man for the first time; and now that he’s tasted the life he can have –power, women, fame—he won’t give it up for the loneliness of a life where the high point of the week was a game of chess with a computer” (56).
Among a panoply of new background characters introduced in this novel, the most memorable is Ensign Sara George –a sensual woman who is described as a “little sex machine” with a “firm bottom” and a “provocative wiggle.” She is routinely paraded around as a prop with a “firmly rounded rump” and she is often playfully nude for no particular reason (in one scene, she spontaneously strips down to go for a swim). Her dop was naturally an Orion Slave girl (a nod to the unaired pilot “The Cage”) and when she and Spock initially beamed down to Kyros for the survey –“we took off our clothes and made love. We were like two rutting cats.” In my view, all of this is head-shakingly silly, very much dated, and is also coupled with other prejudicial remarks made throughout the book –for example, Dr. M’benga is simply called “the black physician,” Sulu is referred to as the “Oriental,” and so on.
At any rate, Kirk and McCoy beam down disguised as a Kyrosian sea captains from the western islands (wearing knee-length white shorts, sandals, and a vest-like upper-garment with a short cape attached to the shoulders by a heavy gold chain, and a blue stone fob indicating his rank, and an animal skin pouch containing triangular shaped gold coins. Personally, I love this level of detail in the imagined world of Kyros). Anyway, they are joined by Ensign George who serves as the bait for Spock/Chag Gara. They meet Ker Kaseme, an outcast and “first among healers” who becomes their guide. Kirk becomes “Healer Hirga” and Dr. McCoy becomes “Healer Makai.” However, after some frivolous twists and turns, and a subplot in which Spock holds the Enterprise hostage over its trilithium crystals, the landing party members are captured by the Messiah’s men and sentenced to be burned alive (as “demons in Beshwa bodies”) while Ensign George is taken away (after performing a seductive dance) so the Messiah can have his way with her. But during the course of their “activities,” she notices he does not have pointed ears, thus he must the real Chag Gara and not Spock. She quickly knocks the man unconscious which releases Spock from his mental grip by the Messiah and she starts a diversion which allows the Enterprise crew (including Spock) to return to the ship.
What exactly happened here? This all gets fairly ludicrous: “Spock explained it to me on the bridge. The melded minds could only control one body at a time. When Spock was linked to Gara, two things happened simultaneously. First, the emotional input was so strong that it overwhelmed the filter stage of the implant and established a two-way link so that Chag Gara had immediate access to Spock’s mind. Secondly, the emotional from his dop caused Spock such intense psychic pain that his will went into a state of shock. He was aware of what was happening, but there was nothing he could do about it; he was a marionette with Gara pulling the strings” (177).
The Enterprise manages to escape the radiation redline by only a few hours –but they still shockingly plan to return in a couple weeks to finish survey of Kyr and also to “block all memory” from Chag Gara’s mind. How is this possible? Since when does the Enterprise have the power to erase memories? In the end, Bones and Kirk plan to finish a bottle of canopian brandy they had opened earlier in the novel, Kirk plans to read more Xenophon, and Spock plans to challenge the ship’s computer to a game of three-dimensional chess.
Final Thoughts:
While there were some elements of Spock, Messiah! I found to be mildly entertaining, albeit filled with sorely dated tropes, in general this falls into the more ridiculous vein of Star Trek literature. For example: why in the world would Starfleet permit the use of experimental cephalic implants? And why would the Enterprise allow this volatile technology to be used on an untested Vulcan mind? And why wouldn’t the Enterprise have a feature to be able to deactivate the dops? And what are we supposed to make of the sudden appearance of the giant radiation cloud? Will the rapidly approaching cloud avoid the Kyrosians on the planet surface? I am left with many unanswered questions with this one. I would recommend skipping this adventure.
Notes:
- Lt. Uhura is described as being of Bantu descent and Lt. Sulu is said to have been born on Alpha Mensa Five (which contradicts other canonical references to him being born in San Francisco).
- Sulu makes a brief reference to the episode “The Squire of Gothos.” Nurse Christine Chapel makes an allusion to “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” And the novel Spock Must Die! is alluded to by Dr. McCoy.
- New characters appear in this novel: Lt. Helman, Navigator Vitali, Helmsman Shaffer, Ensign Sara George, Lt. Peters, Lt. Rogers, Lt. Dawson, Lt. Leslie, and others.
- Kirk is reading Xenophon’s Anabasis in this novel.
- Canopian brandy is mentioned as an amber-colored unlike green Saurian brandy.
- On Kyros, there is a cultural distinction between the urban dwellers who live in the major city of Andros, and the hill clans who are nomadic herdsman (or “Beshwa” who are akin to “Kyrosian gypsies”). The Kyrosians have a D+ Rating on the Richter Cultural Scale, at least the city-dwelling lowlanders do. And it is considered taboo to expose your face among the hillman.
- Afterbliss is a heavenly realm periodically referenced by the Messiah.
- Kyros’s yellow sun is known as “Kyr.”
- “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is briefly referenced.
- Dr. McCoy describes himself as “an old Georgia farm boy raised around Missouri mules.”
Cogswell, Theodore R. and Charles A. Spano, Jr. Spock, Messiah! A Bantam Book. New York, NY. September 1976. The original tagline read “The Ultra-Powered Novel of a Telepathic Space Terror!” With unique cover art by Gene Szafran.