Talk:Mission to Horatius

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Fair use rationale for Image:STMissionToHoratius.jpg

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Which Is It?

This Wikipedia page claims this book, Mission To Haroatius, as the first book for adult readers. But the Wikipedia page for Spock Must Die, also claims the same thing: "It was the first original novel based the Star Trek television series intended for adult readers." Som which is it? This book or the other book. They can't both be the first one for adult readers. HaarFager (talk) 01:48, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Mission To Horatius is a children's book. I've still got my copy, which I bought as a kid in 1968 at its original publication. I've also still got my copy of Spock Must Die, which I bought a couple of years later.

(1) Mission To Horatius was published by Whitman Publishing of Racine, WI, a company which at that time focused on children's books. Inside the back cover is a list of other Whitman titles, including such items as Hound Of The Baskervilles and Tales To Tremble By. At that time, we elementary school kids could buy recreational reading directly through the school; various publishers would lists of their titles to teachers who would show them to interested students. Whitman was one of the publishers that did this; not the only one, but I certainly remember seeing a lot of Whitman books back then.

(2) Mission To Horatius pretty short, about 40K to 45K publisher's word count by my estimate. That doesn't mean in itself that it's a childrens' book; for example, Spock Must Die is of similar length. But you don't see many kids' books with 100K words.

(3) Spock Must Die has all of the following; some speculations on race and sexuality; references to tachyons, chemical chirality, and amino acids; actual profanity ("son of a bitch"); references to events that had happened on televised Star Trek episodes; a presumption that the reader is already familiar with the Klingons and Organians; one instance of time dilation; a reference to Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice; a reference to James Joyce and Finnegan's Wake; and a fairly deep philosophical question -- when someone is transported, is it the original that arrives on the other end or a replica, and what are the implications? Mission To Horatius has none of these things, the characters are portrayed far more simply, and to the extent it presumes any prior knowledge at all in the reader, it's only that Stone Age people were primitive, medieval society was religious, and Nazis (referenced obliquely) were bad. (Occasionally it stretches an eight year old's vocabulary, but not unreasonably so.)

(4) In Mission To Horatius, the most prominent minor character is a teenage boy, Grang, who gets to travel along on the Enterprise for a while and actually work with Kirk, Spock, etc. It's fairly obvious Grang is there for young male readers to identify with. Spock Must Die has only ordinary adult characters. --2602:306:B81E:8F60:8C95:523B:8D0E:BD12 (talk) 13:43, 13 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]