Spock, Messiah!

Spock, Messiah!, by Theodore R. Cogswell and Charles A. Spano, Jr.

September, 1976  Bantam Books

Reading this Star Trek novel was similar to my reading of The Ninja in that it was a read decades in the making. As a young Star Trek fan in the mid-‘80s* I had a copy of this book (the 1984 edition with the cover by Enric, below, which I bought fresh off the rack at the local WaldenBooks store), but boy I was never able to read it. Even then Spock, Messiah! seemed so weird, so Seventies. 

Of course, that is exactly what appeals to me about it today. That, and the wonderfully-negative reviews on Goodreads. I’ve perhaps mentioned my “Goodreads Rule” before: if an old book has negative reviews on Goodreads, it most likely means that I will like it. Goodreads reviewers are, on the average, a meek lot, hung up on their various “isms” and eager to be offended by anything that was published before, say, 2008. 

But another thing about those meek Goodreads reviewers is that they are often so eager to be offended that they blow things out of proportion. Such, unfortunately, is the case with Spock, Messiah!. Constant mentions of how its main female protagonist is “exploited,” how Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy make frequent lewd references to her hotstuff bod…how, even most shockingly, she has sex with none other than Spock. 

As it turns out, the “exploitation” is minimal at best (we’re often told the gal is pretty, curvy, or well-built – and that’s it), Kirk and McCoy’s “lewd” comments are often made in jest, and the Spock-banging happens entirely off-page and is only relayed via dialog. So I mean, I guess if your idea of Star Trek is Whoopi Goldberg dispensing her version of wisdom in a big goofy hat, then maybe you’ll find the above offensive…personally I felt that the authors, Theodore Cogswell and Charles Spano, didn’t go far enough.

After all, they were writing in the early days, the uncharted days – the days when Star Trek authors could churn out bizarre shit like The Price Of The Phoenix and The Fate Of The Phoenix. The days when Gene Roddenberry wasn’t demanding you make edits to your manuscript to make it all seem more safe to the Star Trek brand. Personally, I would’ve given the “Spock bangs a horny female crewmate” sequence an entire chapter. 

So yes, it’s rather tame when compared to the overheated Goodreads complaints/reviews. However, it’s also kind of tepid in general, getting overwhelmed as it does in the second half with a nigh-endless trek across some planet with Mongol-like people. Like, the sort of thing that would last a few minutes in the average episode of the original show, here given chapter after chapter. 

On the other hand, after reading stuff like The Fate Of The Phoenix, Spock, Messiah! is notable because it actually feels like a Star Trek story. After reading the two Phoenix novels, I was plumb surprised to see Bones and Scotty and Chekov and all the other Enterprise crew appearing in the book; these characters barely even existed in the Marshak and Culbreath novels. 

There is also an attempt to make all the characters true to the show: Bones is crusty, Kirk is stalwart and keeps a brave face even when he must force himself to. Scotty is there with a joke, but curiously here he’s also been retrofitted into like the Star Trek version of Q, coming up with devices and gadgets to use on the mission. 

The plot is kind of convoluted: the Enterprise is doing like a cultural survey mission on a planet called Kyros with humanoid, Earth-type natives who have a technology level similar to the Middle Ages. The authors come up with this new conceit upon which the entire novel hangs: “dops,” ie from doppelganger, a mind-implant that allows the survey team to mentally connect with random natives so that the survey people will have complete command of the native languages and cultures. 

As the novel opens, Spock, who was on the survey team, is AWOL. An interesting note to make is that Spock is not in the novel! I was very surprised by this, but Spock literally only appears in the final pages. Rather, he becomes the main villain of Spock, Messiah!, as the plot concerns Spock being so affected by his dop, a radical who believes that he has been chosen by the gods to conquer Kyros, that Spock himself becomes the “messiah” of these gods, putting together an army to conquer the planet. 

Meanwhile there’s something about a radiation storm hovering around Kyros that keeps the Enterprise from fully engaging, messing up the transporters and communication and etc – in other words, allowing the authors to strand Kirk and his hand-picked party on Kyros as they try to track down Spock and bring him back…or, as Kirk says when things get bad, to kill Spock if necessary. Honesty, “Kill Spock!” would’ve been a better title for the novel. 

We get the sleazy stuff, or at least what passes for it, as an info-dump very early in the novel. Ensign Sara George, the hotstuff crewmate who draws so much ire from modern reviewers, has taken advantage of the dop setup to let down her hair, so to speak, and has “dopped” herself with a Kryosian whore (seriously – does “Kryosian Whore” sound like the name for a metal band or what??), and she fudged the dop setup protocols (of which she was a part of orchestrating) so that fudgy-dudgy Spock was dopped with a sex-starved freak with delusions of messiahood. Hot Earthling-Vulcan sex ensued…entirely off-page. 

Indeed, as novel opens the damage has been done and the banging has been banged; Ensign George regrets her actions and Spock meanwhile has gone fullblown crazy, disappearing on Kyros after disabling his transmitter or whatever it’s called and also he’s taken the Enterprise hostage, stealing the dilithium crystals – and I was such a Jerky Boys fan in the ‘90s that anytime I see “dilithium crystals” I always think of that one where Johnny B. took the poor Japanese guy over the coals – “I’m drilling for dilithium crystals, baby!” 

So a contrite Sara George spends the novel apologizing, and meanwhile she friggin’ shuts down the whorish part of her dop, thus cheating us from any sleazy a-doings. In fact poor Kirk goes babeless this time, and is for the most part more eager to sit in his cabin and read Xenophon for the thousandth time. But he and McCoy only occasionally make any ribald comments about her figure, so the reviews truly are overblown – though there is a part where, down on Kyros, Sara strips down and skinny-dips, but the authors are incredibly chaste when it comes to describing the jutting upthrusting globular goods. Bummer! 

Rather, Spock Messiah! is an overlong chase sequence where the chasing is mostly comprised of Kirk and McCoy trying to figure out where Spock – or the native he dopped with, Chag Gara – happens to be, and also they can’t leave because Spock stole the dilithium crystals and whatnot. 

So a party beams down to Kyros, among them Chekov, and I actually read this book shortly before Walter Koenig passed away. As I mentioned on here before, I met Koenig way back in the summer of 2000 when I was working at a startup called Timerwolf Press, founded by a guy who was “the first employee of Mark Cuban at Broadcasting.com.” At the time I had no idea who Mark Cuban was, but the people at Timberwolf told me he was a big deal….I still didn’t know who Mark Cuban was until he came onto Shark Tank many years later, and I only watched that sporadically. 

Anyway, we flew Walter Koenig into Allen, Texas to read a book we’d published titled All The Tea (so obscure that I could literally only find one online listing of the Audio CD just now -- at Amazon India!!), and we had a state-of-the-art recording facility in the office. In fact there was often a day when I’d be a hard at work “marketing coordinator” twenty-three-year-old, and someone would rush over to my desk and ask me if I wouldn’t mind voicing a medieval-era slave trader for some fantasy novel called Bradamant that we’d published and were doing an audio adaptation of. So in hindsight, it was a fun job. 

I didn’t “voice a character” in Koenig’s production – I seem to recall we got an actual producer for that one, and she insisted on talent – but I did get to meet him, mainly because there were like only 5 people working at Timberwolf Press, me being the fifth. As I mentioned on here in some previous post that escapes me, literally the first thing I said to Walter Koenig was: “Hi, my name’s Joe. What’s William Shatner like?” My question clearly threw him, but to his credit Koenig paused for a few moments before he answered. And his answer was: “Bill is a strange guy. But he’s a good guy.” 

I recall I also got the job of going to Chic Fil A to get him lunch, and he wanted some friggin’ sandwich that wasn’t on the menu, and I had to get in an argument with the guy at the drive-through to get it made…and I didn’t even get reimbursed for the sandwich, so in the end I bought Walter Koenig lunch. Now that should be the title of my autobiography. And no I didn’t tell him, I kept that to myself – he probably had no idea how smallbones Timberwolf Press was – but I did tell him that the earworms thing in Star Trek II freaked me out when I saw it as a kid in the theater, and he thought that was funny, and he agreed that they were indeed freaky. 

Well anyway, RIP Walter Koenig…I also recall him mentioning his son that summer of 2000, saying with some pride that he was a stand-up comedian; I never did look that up, but I saw in the recent pieces on Koenig after his death that Koenig’s son committed suicide several years ago, and man that is a terrible thing…that made me very sad to read. 

So Chekov is part of the ground crew that goes down to Kyros, and in fact gets a few lines – indeed, he subtly hits on Ensign George (when she’s nude, even!), but gets shot down. As mentioned, her whore dop has been turned off, and more’s the pity. And meanwhile, Spock still isn’t in the damn novel! What’s crazy is Spock, Messiah! was published in the heyday of Spock fandom, so you’d think by the title that the authors were catering to that, but nope – it’s all about “the search for Spock” (lame movie title in-joke alert), but Spock himself ain’t around. 

Instead, we get a lot of digressive bullshit about the crew among the mountain folk of this planet, and also there’s this bizarre culture where everyone wears robes and masks with colored eyeslits, and this factors into the surprise reveal at the end. But action-wise, not much happens. Kirk et al run afoul of various tribes and also the followers of Spock, most of whom want to kill them, and there’s also a part where the Enterprise uses a tractor beam or something to levitate corpses at Spock’s command – there’s this hard-to-understand conceit that Spock calls in threats to Sulu, back on the ship, and orders him to do things or else. 

Really, the novel sort of limps along in the second half – there are interminable scenes of Kirk and McCoy going incognito as natives and even a bizarrely overdone part where they try to hitch a wagon (and I don’t mean “hitch a wagon” in some sleazy innuendo sense; they’re literally hitching a wagon), and also lots of stuff with the pack animals on Kyros, and meanwhile sexy Sara George goes skinny-dipping and that gets like two sentences, without even a single friggin’ reference to her breasts. I mean, “The water cascaded down her upthrusting breasts like a silver torrent spilling over twin mountains of forbidden desire;” how hard can it be, people?? 

The finale features a surprise reveal where the villain wasn’t who we thought he was all along, and then finally on the last few pages Spock appears, and all is well…kind of a lame ending, really. Spock, Messiah! isn’t really the best Star Trek novel you could read, honestly, but it’s still cool because it retains the vibe of the original series but with a bit of a 1970s attitude…one could imagine Shatner with extra thick sideburns in the tv version of this story in some alternate 1975 where Star Trek was still airing. 

Now in my review for The Fate Of The Phoenix I mentioned that Triangle would be the next Star Trek novel I read, and by gum it will be – next time! 

*I have this memory I’ve hung onto for the past 40 years…my father had one of those big backyard satellite antennas that were all the rage in the mid-1980s, especially among recently-divorced men, I’m sure. Well anyway, I have a recollection of sometime in 1985 or 1986 watching the satellite feed of some Star Trek convention somewhere; all I remember was that it ran all weekend, and featured fans in some convention hall, most of them wearing costumes, watching episodes of the original Star Trek, which of course was the only Star Trek at the time, other than the movies. I also recall seeing people in sleeping bags when it got real late, like they were sleeping there during the marathon. And there was no celebrity host, so far as I recall; it was just the fans themselves introducing each episode. I’ve tried and tried to determine where and when this convention was – no web search has answered the question, and no AI platform has any idea – so if anyone out there has an idea, please let me know. 

And finally, here is that 1984 Bantam edition of Spock, Messiah! I bought back in the day, in fact I know I bought it right around the time of that convention; the cover is by Enric: 

This review brought to you by Classic Club Spiced Rum – around $12 at your nearest Total Wine!