Cyborg (The Six Million Dollar Man)

Cyborg, by Martin Caidin

March, 1974  Warner Paperback Library

(original hardcover edition 1972)

The beginning of the Six Million Dollar Man saga is a novel made up of many parts, as if Martin Caidin were running a theme around the bionic parts that make up his hero Steve Austin, the titular Cyborg of this novel. The first part of the 318-page book with its tiny print is like something out of Caidin’s Space Race novels, then the book becomes a Michael Crichton-esque sci-fi medical shocker…then it becomes a wild pulp yarn, then it becomes a Cold War thriller, and finally it settles in for an overlong “desert survival” climax that leaves the reader more exhausted than thrilled. 

The main thing, though, is how little Cyborg resembles the family-friendly Six Million Dollar Man. Only the original telefilm, which I reviewed ten years ago, comes closest to resembling this source novel, but having read the book I can see that a lot of it was changed, no doubt for budget reasons. Cyborg would have benefitted from a big screen treatment, but then if it had it might not have made as much of an impact on 1970s pop culture…there might not even have been a Steve Austin doll! And man, I still wish I had mine…the fake skin on his arm was so cool! Not to mention the red rubber Adidas sneakers that would always fall off and you’d have to search for them! 

Actually, I was wrong – Lee Majors’ portrayal of Steve Austin is the closest thing the series ever came to resembling Martin Caidin’s source material. Majors nails the character, which is to say he comes off like the distillation of every astronaut of the Space Race, from Mercury to Apollo: laconic to the point of being terse, so calm under pressure he could be comatose. And we are informed here that Steve Austin was indeed an Apollo astronaut, the youngest one in the program and the last to walk on the moon, in Apollo 17. 

As in his earlier The Cape, Caidin again unwittingly prefigures Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in his detailing of Steve’s current job: test pilot for NASA. And yes, Caidin mainly refers to his character as “Steve,” unlike Michael Jahn, who called him “Austin” in the later Wine, Women, And War. Here Caidin gives us a lot of background detail on NASA and missions once the moon shots had been scrapped. 

I have to say that at this point I can safely state that I’m not a fan of Martin Caidin’s writing. He constantly tells instead of shows; his novels come off like lectures, given the wealth of detail and minutiae. Forward momentum is constantly stalled as Caidin eagerly dives into the weeds, usually with no consideration to what he’s doing to the narrative. It happens constantly throughout, and if this material had been gutted Cyborg would be a much smoother and more entertaining read, because as it was I really found it a chore. 

We all know the story, so I’ll skip all the details. Steve crashes out and is completely destroyed – both legs and his left arm are gone, as is his left eye, and a bunch of other stuff is wrecked. Enter OSO (which became OSI in the series), headed up by Oscar Goldman…much closer here to Darren McGavin’s portrayal in the original telefilm than the easy-going nice guy Richard Anderson would deliver in the ensuing series. Goldman is a figure of the shadow world, clearly duplicitous and not feeling the need to explain himself to others. 

Given his fame and his background – athletic and karate expertise, his service as a combat pilot in ‘Nam, etc – OSO wants to invest in Steve Austin…though, humorously enough given the famous name of the ensuing show, we are never told the exact amount they are willing to pay. Steve’s good buddy-slash doctor, Rudy Wells, helps talk Steve into the offer…and here, as in the telefilm, there’s a lot of grim stuff as Steve isn’t sure if he even wants to live. 

A little over a quarter of the way in, we get into the nitty-gritty of bionics, courtesy endless blocks of exposition. Interesting to note, the majority of the work is done by a character who did not exist in the series: Dr. Killian. Martin Caidin shows absolutely no understanding that he is writing a novel, with Killian and the other characters gabbing about bionic parts and how they work, even down to minor details the average reader wouldn’t care about. I mean Caidin’s grip on dramatic fiction is so loose that there’s a part where someone makes a minor comment about red blood cells, and Steve – confined to a hospital bed without either leg, his left arm, and missing his left eye – asks for more information about red blood cells, like how exactly they work and what they do and whatever. I mean, just put the bionic limbs on him and have him go crush someone, already! 

Boy, does Caidin really take his time here. Let it never be said that he rushes into the story. It goes on and on, with each and every part Steve gets being relentlessly detailed for the reader, usually via bald exposition. But he’s given bionic legs that allow him to run at incredible speeds (we’re just told he brakes all Olympics records), and a left arm that is equally superhuman (changed to his right arm in the TV series). Also, we are told ad naseum that Steve cannot see out of his bionic left eye – I mean this is hammered home repeatedly – but he can take photos with it. 

Caidin displays an unexpected pulpy flair with the augmentations to these bionic limbs, things that did not make it to the show. For one, there’s a compartment in Steve’s left leg with an oxygen tank for underwater missions, and also with a few changes Steve can turn his feet into fins. There are also handy little compartments on his feet for storing things. His left arm can fire poisonous darts from the middle finger – I’m assuming Caidin was showing subtle humor here by having us imagine Steve Austin giving people the finger as he kills them. He also has a steel skull plate and a radio transmitter in his rib. 

The bionics finally added and Steve having proven himself by saving some children from a burning bus, the novel suddenly turns into a pulpy sci-fi thriller as Steve is dropped into the ocean by the South American country of Surinam, to make a daunting underwater swim and take photos of some submarines the damned Russians have stashed somewhere. And for company Steve has a pair of cybernetic dolphins, one of which is an automated decoy and the other that Steve pilots, like his own one-man sub, and all this is presented to us on the level, as if it were of a piece with the grim, incessantly-detailed “medical science” tone of the first half of the book. 

Not that I was complaining, it was just so wild. But even here Caidin’s “tell don’t show” instincts conflict with the pulp, with our author bogging us down with hyper detail on ocean currents and whatnot. That said, when I started reading Cyborg I never expected to read about Steve Austin decked out like an underwater commando and piloting a robot dolphin. There’s even a bit of action as the Russians start dropping bombs – they’re in the middle of a battle, which has been staged as a diversion for Steve – and then frogmen come at him, but the action is more so relayed as chaotic than thrilling. We learn here that the Steve Austin of the novel – much like the Steve Austin of the first television season – is quite willing to kill if he has to. 

Sadly this is the only part of Cyborg that goes full pulp, and only if the entire novel were the same. Truly, it’s like something book packager/producer Lyle Kenyon Engel might have come up with – and I have a suspicion that both his Attar The Merman and John Eagle Expeditor were inspired by Cyborg, from the “dolphin commando” of the former series to the “look at my cool gadgets, dart gun, and my atomic one-man sub, which by the way is actually named The Dolphin!” of the latter. 

Clearly this entire sequence was too costly for a network budget, so it was removed. But for me it was the highlight of Cyborg, like a pleasant reward for us pulp-inclined readers for having made it through the previous slow-going half. True, Caidin’s fussiness prevents the sequence from achieving its full pulp potential, but overall it’s still entertaining, which can’t be said about the sequence that takes us through the final quarter of the novel. 

OSO used the sub photo mission as a warmup; now Steve is sent to the Middle East, where he is to slip into fictional country Asfir, teamed up with the beautiful but hard-bitten Israeli soldier Tamara. Caidin skirts with more pulpish material by introducing Tamara as she’s stripping casually in front of Steve, but nothing ever happens here; Caidin is much more focused on exploiting his own knowledge than he is in exploiting his female characters. 

The idea here is that Tamara, who is fluent in Russian – just like Steve is, somehow courtesy his time in the space race – is to pose as Steve’s wife, and they must be completely at ease with each other. Personally I thought she was trying to give Steve a hint, but as mentioned Steve Austin is very laconic and almost comatose, so nothing happens – indeed, there is only one sex scene in the novel, Steve finally giving in to the romantic wiles of his nurse, Jean Manners, but the sexual tomfoolery occurs completely off page. 

Steve and Tamara are here to steal the new Russian jet fighter, a MiG-27, so just like he unwittingly prefigured The Right Stuff, here Caidin unwittingly prefigures Firefox. It’s a taut Cold War thriller, but the only problem was that I had no idea why Steve Austin was needed for the mission. That is the central problem with the second half of Cyborg; it’s as if the first “bionic surgery” part has nothing to do with the second part, and Steve Austin could have been replaced by any generic Cold Warrior. 

I mean, at least in the underwater South America sequence it was believable that OSO needed a cyborg; Steve’s oxygen tank augmentations allow him to go underwater and sneak around a lot better than an ordinary scuba diver could. But here in the Asfir sequence, the bionics are almost completely forgotten. Only belatedly are they used, when Steve uses his bionic left arm to snap a guy’s collarbone while he’s in the process of torturing a captured Steve. There’s also a part where Steve uses that bionic left hand to smash some skulls, and I’m happy to report the dart finger is used a few times in the book. But still, any of this stuff could’ve been replaced by a standard spy gadget; why exactly a cyborg is needed is something Caidin can never fully explain. And why would OSO risk losing their huge investment on a suicide mission to steal a jet fighter? 

Even worse, the actual climax of the book is an endless trawl in which Steve and Tamara are trapped in the desert, trying to survive the elements and get to freedom. Good grief, friends, but it goes on and on. Again Caidin resorts to his “tell, don’t show” policy, making the turgid pace of the narrative seem even slower. It’s all grim and gritty, complete with Tamara’s instruction that their urine must be saved so they can wipe their lips with it to stave off complete dehydration, etc. 

Here, more than anywhere, it seems evident that Martin Caidin is shoehorning some other novel into Cyborg, as the desert trek has nothing to do with the rest of the book. That said, Caidin somehow uses it as an excuse for Steve Austin to realize he wants to live, even though he already came to that decision a few hundred pages ago. Also, it is stated at the end of the novel that Steve and Tamara have “found each other” – humorously, poor nurse Jean is just forgotten – and I’m curious to see if Tamara appears in Caidin’s follow-up, Operation Nuke, which was published the following year. 

Overall, Cyborg is a slow-going affair that only occasionally brightens up, and also there are flashes where Caidin will demonstrate emotional investment in his characters and they stop being expository automatons and show actual spark. These sequences indicate the novel Cyborg could have been, and I have to say the TV producers did a better job of uncovering the potential of the material than Caidin himself did.

Four Came Back

Four Came Back, by Martin Caidin

February, 1970  Bantam Books

Another in the sequence of Space Race novels Martin Caidin published in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, Four Came Back almost comes off like a sequel to his later novel The Cape, even though there are no recurring characters. The Cape took place in 1972 and concerned the launch of a manned space station; Four Came Back also occurs in 1972 and concerns a group of astronauts trapped on a manned space station. And the reason they are trapped there is very resonant with our modern era: a mysterious virus has run amok, laying waste to half the crew. 

In fact, the title of the novel pretty much blows the suspense Caidin tries to develop over the 215+ pages. And speaking of which, take a look at the cover, which per the blurry signature (and the style itself) appears to be the work of Sandy Kossin, who later did the covers for the John Eagle Expeditor series: The Andromeda Strain is specifically referenced in the blurb, giving the impression that Four Came Back is a similar thriller, one with perhaps a military angle. There’s no mention of space anywhere, and Kossin does not feature any Saturn rockets or astronauts in his illustration. So clearly by this paperback’s February 1970 printing date, “space” was no longer considered much of a selling point, giving more indication of how quickly the public’s interest in the subject waned after Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July of 1969. 

But as with No Man’s World, Martin Caidin is writing a “near future” thriller here; the original hardcover was published in 1968, and Caidin was likely writing it in 1967. Certainly after the Apollo 1 disaster, which is referenced in the text. Otherwise he mostly sticks to detailing Gemini missions, and of course there’s no mention of the Apollo 11 crew. But then Caidin in his space race novels didn’t try to do roman a clefs, per se; he uses NASA and the general framework of Apollo-Saturn, but incorporates his own cast of characters. The shame of it is that it apparently never occurred to Caidin to feature recurring characters, making this into a loose sort of series; I mean he could’ve easily featured some of the astronauts from Four Came Back in The Cape, or for that matter even featured some of the characters from Marooned (original edition 1963, revised tie-in paperback 1969 – and the only one of Caidin’s space race sequence I haven’t read yet, though I’ve seen the movie…twice! And stayed awake both times!). 

The title isn’t the only thing that blows the suspense; for some curious reason Caidin opens the novel with a chapter written in first-person (in ugly italics), documenting the journal of the unnamed captain of the space station Epsilon. Here, over the course of a few pages, the captain tells us of how a strange virus broke loose two weeks before the crew was scheduled to return to Earth. Eight people were originally aboard Epsilon, and the captain tells us, incident by incident, how four of them grew sick and some of them died. So already in the first chapter we know that “four” will come back because the other four are dead or incapacitated, and we also know which of those four died and how! All so puzzling and unintentionally humorous, like starting off a murder mystery with a first chapter that tells you who the killer is, then backpedaling and trying to play out a mystery angle for the rest of the novel. 

After this opening we jump back three weeks and things go into third-person; the captain of Epsilon is your typical rugged Apollo astronaut type, former hotshot combat and test pilot Mike Harder, and we meet him as he goes about his usual captain duties on the orbiting station, meeting with the rest of the multinational crew. Why Caidin didn’t just start the novel here is a mystery. Harder, despite his rugged virility, is pretty much a buffoon, at least when it comes to the ladies. I mentioned that the station’s multinational; it’s also made up of both men and women, with NASA here even in the world of fiction getting bullied for only sending men into space. Race isn’t mentioned, though; an interesting perspective is that in Caidin’s era it was gender that whipped the SJWs into a lather. Thus, NASA has relented and sent up six men and two women, from all around the world…but they’re all still white. 

The crew has been up here some months, and as with the other novels of his I’ve read, Caidin tells the story via somewhat clunky backstory or exposition, usually at the expense of any forward momentum. And also without much in the way of structure; we’re not told Harder’s backstory, for example, until well into the novel, even though he’s the main character. Anyway I was mentioning that he’s a bit of a doofus with the ladies. Well, one of the crew is a hotstuff brunette babe from Norway named June Strond, “a raven-haired thirty-one-year-old woman scientist” with ample curves in all the right places. And, per Harder’s incessant navel-gazing introspective musing, them Norwegians treat sex like Americans treat kissing. Meaning it’s no big thing to them, and it’s clear June wants Harder to make a pass at her so they can get right down to it up here, four hundred miles above the Earth, in one-G gravity. 

But Harder, for inexplicable reasons, can’t bring himself to make the pass; he’s flummoxed and fears he might be in love with June, and doesn’t want to spoil anything. Or something like that. The entire premise is so lame, particularly given that Harder’s in his 30s, a vet, and, Caidin assures us (almost desperately), has had his fair share of women. Compounding the issue is that another of the crew is a French dandy named Henri Guy-Michel, a lothario who is known for his womanizing. Guy-Michel’s already gotten busy with Epsilon’s other female crewmember, blonde American beauty Page Allison. But the French louse also wants to add June to his scorecard, and in one of Caidin’s clunky bits of backstory (clunky because they come off like they’re occuring in the main narrative, but are really in the past) we see Guy-Michel make his move – and get punched by Harder. 

And really, this soap opera dynamic is what fuels the first half of Four Came Back, with Caidin gradually filling in the backstory of the crew. None of them make much of an impression, though. There’s Koelbe, the German, who hides a Nazi past, and a couple engineers and other assorted astronauts who might as well be wearing red shirts, if you get my drift. The main characters are really Harder and June, and Caidin spends a lot of the narrative on this lame “will they or won’t they” storyline, which gets to be as annoying as any such storylines can be. Too bad Guy-Michel wasn’t the star of the show; now there’s a guy who knows how to have some sordid fun in one-G, but sadly Caidin doesn’t feature the character as much, and only tells us of his plans to do randy things with Page. Once again I can only regret that Harold Robbins never wrote a novel about the space race. 

According to the copyright page, Four Came Back was originally published in hardcover in November 1968, and as mentioned I assume Caidin was writing it at least in 1967. Well before Apollo 11, which would become one of the definining moments of the 20th Century, not to mention one of the most watched events in TV history. And yet Caidin was already able to predict the dwindling interests in the space program. Notably, the moon landing is not mentioned in the text as having happened or about to happen, however Caidin still has it that the public has moved on from the whole “space” thing, and NASA drummed up this multinational space station idea to curry interest, even giving in to public pressure and finally allowing women to take part in it. This, Caidin informs us, went over so well with the country that the Epsilon space station became the biggest draw NASA ever ran, with millions of fans around the world avidly keeping up with events on the space station…for nearly a full year, now, and their interest has not waned. 

Per the times, the sexual angle is a big draw for the crowds on Earth, with everyone mulling over just what might happen with the four male astronauts and two female astronauts up there in space. In particular Guy-Michel’s exploits have garnered much rumor and speculation; as with Countdown, we have here an alternate reality in which the papers publish gossip material about the space industry. As the novel opens, Epsilon’s been in orbit for nearly a year, and the crew has maintained the public’s interest with regular TV broadcasts of them doing this or that scientific experiement, or reporting on their findings up in space. None of it sounds like anything that would keep up interest for a day, let alone a year; we learn that Page Allison has grown plants that are stories tall in the weightless environment, and we also have an overlong bit where Harder and another of the rugged astronaut dudes cavort in a water tank like “human fish” for an experiment. 

The plot promised on the back cover only arises well past the halfway point. And it intrudes right on that “will they or won’t they” subplot. After nearly a year of being skittish over June’s clear interest, Mike Harder finally decides to give her the goods, despite this being right after the two of them have endured a grueling EVA and are all grimy and sweaty and whatnot. But a call from Guy-Michel interrupts them pre-boink. The station is approaching a “dust cloud” and the scientists aboard want to study the hell out of it. Harder, after getting the details – and leaving a jilted June back in her quarters – gives them the go-ahead to study the cloud. But as it turns out, this cloud will contaminate Epsilon with a strange space sickness that fells half the crew in just a few days. 

There’s a vibe of Alien as the crew, one by one, starts to come down with a mysterious illness that initially has no explanation. And yes, the two redshirts are the first to suffer, with one of them sprouting a strange rash and then gradually going nuts, even trying to kill the others. Strangely enough it reminded me of the penultimate episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO, in which a moon crystal or somesuch caused some people at SHADO to go nuts. But this novel predates even that. However Caidin doesn’t much exploit the horror potential. In fact he totally misses one such opportunity; early in the novel, during an EVA, Harder and June must wait for a fellow crew member to open the airlock door for them so they can enter Epsilon. Knowing the plot of the novel, I figured this was foreshadowing that, once the virus ran amok, someone would get stuck in space. However this never happens. 

Indeed, when the mysterious virus hits the crew, it’s treated so methodically as to be boring. Koelbe, the medical doctor, confines some to bed, puzzling over the illness, before he too is felled by it – the bit that reminded me of UFO, in fact, with Koelbe literally racing from his nightmares through the corridors of the space station. But other than the part where the one redshirt goes crazy and tries to attack people, there’s no real chaos, no real space horrors. In other words, there was a lot of potential here for a more thrilling read. Heck, even the sexual subplot is poorly handled; when Harder and June finally get to it…Caidin leaves it off page! The very act he spent the entire first half of the book setting up, and he feels it’s unworthy of actually being described. 

Caidin does unconsciously hit upon some prescience; when word gets to Earth of the space virus, the public goes insane, going to great lengths to protect itself from the threat. And yes, here too the media does its best to drum up the fear, with no attempt to face the threat with rationality. This leads to all sorts of insane reactions on Earth, yet even Caidin couldn’t think of the insanity of our real modern world. Regardless, the fictional space virus is pretty survivable: note that Harder, June, and Guy-Michel don’t even get any symptoms, and some of their crewmates die “with” the virus, not “of” the virus. But that doesn’t prevent any panic: the people on the ground are terrified that the returning crew will unleash an apocalyptic plague. This leads to nicely-rendered scenes of people going crazy and rioting in Houston, trying to destroy any further rocket launches – and destroying themselves by stupidly molotov-cocktailing the rocket fuel tanks. Caidin really enjoyed tearing this place up in print; there was a similarly apocalyptic Johnson Space Center incident in The Cape. 

Caidin fails in the airlock foreshadowing, but he does pay off on another bit of foreshadowing: midway through the book someone mentions Orson Welles’s The War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, and how it generated fear. Late in the book it’s mentioned again, and Wells’s source novel as well, in that the Martians were taken down by basic everyday germs. Thanks to Harder’s memory of a Gemini mission in which someone in Houston got sick after the crew’s return, it’s soon determined that germs are the culprit here, as well – though it’s the reverse of the Wells novel. Now it’s the absence of those germs, in the antiseptic world of space, that has caused the crew to get sick, when mixed with that space dust. Or something like that. At any rate it’s germs to the rescue at novel’s end. 

Of the three Caidin space novels I’ve read, Four Came Back is the one that most takes place in space, but perversely has the fewest scenes in space. The entire novel really occurs in the 90 foot tall, 13-story Epsilon station (built, as in the real-life Skylab of the real-life 1972, around a Saturn V rocket), with frequent and overly long flashbacks to the crew members’s lives on Earth. Despite the brevity the novel is pretty sluggish, and again that’s due to how Martin Caidin tells the tale; as with his other books, he constantly stalls forward momentum with awkwardly-placed flashbacks and never really gives his characters a chance to breathe. I also wanted more of the sleaze in space that Caidin promised in the opening pages!

The Cape

The Cape, by Martin Caidin

No month stated, 1971  Doubleday

The last of the space race novels Martin Caidin published before he hit the big time with Cyborg (which would of course become better known as The Six Million Dollar Man), The Cape takes place in the near-future year of 1972 and is more focused on the ground crew than the astronauts. Also, like Caidin’s earlier No Man’s World, The Cape clearly didn’t resonate with readers of the day, as it only received this original hardcover edition – which, also like No Man’s World, is now grossly overpriced on the used books market. 

I will concur with the contemporary Kirkus review that The Cape was likely influenced by Countdown, only I feel it is a much inferior work to Frank Slaughter’s beach read potboiler. Caidin too attempts to write a sort of melodrama set in the space program, occuring in the titular Cape Kennedy and environs, only he lets his technical familiarity with the program get in the way of telling an entertaining tale. Whereas Slaughter put the characters first, Caidin is more about the nuts and bolts; as with Countdown the tale is more about the preparation for launch rather than the launch itself, with the astronauts minor characters in the narrative. The Cape is all about the technicians and managers behind the scene, and as in No Man’s World Caidin is sure to let you know he’s been there and knows all about it. 

To that end our hero is Ray Curtis, the director of Manned Launch Operations, a brawny and hirsute individual (Caidin often mentions the “thick hair” on the guy’s chest, stomach, and shoulders, giving the impression he’s more ape than man) who currently is overseeing the launch of Apollo 17. In reality this was the last lunar mission, commanded by Gene Cernan and featured in the great mini-documentary The Last Steps. Probably writing in 1971 (the most recent real-world Apollo launch mentioned is Apollo 14, but Caidin refers to it in such a way that I got the impression it hadn’t actually happened yet), Caidin presents a 1972 in which the space program hasn’t been totally gutted, and the US is still actively pursuing “this new ocean.” 

Also another difference here is that the Apollo 17 in Caidin’s novel will be launching the space station Skylab, something that didn’t happen in the real world until 1973 (and had nothing to do with Apollo 17). So again, Caidin was certainly familiar with NASA’s plans, and uses this setup to flesh out the surrounding Cape Kennedy…which turns out to have a somewhat rotten core, again as per Countdown. Actually there’s more to NASA’s plan: for reasons not suitably explained, the agency plans to launch Skylab via Apollo 17, and then secretly launch Apollo 18, a moon shot, immediately after. But Apollo 18 will rendezvous with 17 in Earth orbit, switch commanders, and the commander of Apollo 17 will get in Apollo 18’s command module and continue on the voyage to the moon. I couldn’t understand why the plan was so complicated, other than a vague reference that it might be a way to boost interest in the program again or somesuch. 

At any rate, the major issue with The Cape is that Caidin seems to want to write a beach-read sort of affair at first, but then changes course and turns in a tense thriller that’s undone by too much pedantic info and stalling. While Ray Curtis is the protagonist for the most part, Caidin also introduces a host of other characters, and humorously enough tells us about their past sexploits with girlfriends or mistresses or whatnot in their intros. Again, this just gives the impression that Caidin’s about to attempt a torrid novel about the space race, but ultimately he fails to deliver. Also the underground stuff is as reactionary as Caidin’s later Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve, with marijuana and hash literally turning one minor character’s teenaged daughter into a mindless sex-slave. This revelation only occurs at the very end, and as ever isn’t much exploited, though it does have the laugh-out-loud moment where the father, a bigwig in the space program, is taken to a hippie crash pad by the cops, and there is shown his nude daughter, fresh from her latest orgy and lying in a stupor on the floor. When she sees her dad, whom she is too drugged to even recognize, she asks him, “Wanna fuck?” It’s so over the top it could be out of a Jack Chick comic. 

In addition to Ray Curtis we have a score of supporting characters. Most interesting is Danny Stuart, an Apollo astronaut who has already been to the moon, and will now be the first person to walk on the moon twice, given that he’ll be the Apollo 17 commander who switches over to 18 and heads for the moon. His intro also has us expecting the beach read stuff, as it opens with him flying a jet, ruminating on how astronauts like to have a little extra something on the side in Florida while keeping their wives back in Houston, and then has him meeting up with his mistress – only to learn she’s pregnant! But unfortunately Stuart will soon fade away in the text, his plot more focused on the ramifications of a blackmail scheme cooked up against him by another minor character. At any rate, the opening bit on astronaut marital infidelity could almost come out of Tom Wolfe’s later The Right Stuff (or even “Post-Orbital Remorse”): 

But man, Caidin could have delivered on the “space race beach read” novel I’ve been looking for, by just making Danny Stuart the hero and focusing on his extramarital exploits. And speaking of which all these guys have pretty hectic personal lives; even Paul Jaeger, the fussy ex-Nazi Quality Control Inspector, has his own mistress. Caidin is so focused on quickly dispensing with such info that he loses control of any plotting: for example, we learn early on that Ray Curtis’s secretary, Ginny, is so in love (or actually lust) with her boss that she fantasizes all the time about having sex with him. She’s prone to giving him footrubs and other perks that of course would be frowned upon today. So Caidin establishes this, and will have unintentionally hurmorous moments later in the book where Ginny, all aflutter, will stumble away from a confused Curtis. But Caidin lacks follow-through skills; after Ginny’s secret lust has been established, we cut over to Curtis, unaware of his secretary’s love for him, as he drives off to meet his latest girlfriend. But instead of telling us about her, Caidin instead has Curtis flash back to how he met his first wife, what she was like in bed, and etc…and then neither the first wife nor the latest girlfriend appear in the text again! 

I’m learning though that this is part and parcel of Caidin’s writing style. I’m always comparing him to Mark Roberts, but in reality his prose style is most similar to William Crawford. So similar in fact that if I didn’t know better I’d hypothesize that “William Crawford” was a pseudonym of Martin Caidin, but then we know they were two separate people. But their narrative style, dialog, and storytelling peculiarities are almost identical. Neither seems capable of allowing their characters to breathe, and neither seems unable to stop lecturing the reader via the narrative. There is so much info-dumping in The Cape that you quickly lose all interest. It would be great if you were learning about the space program, or how NASA works, or some other interesting period detail, but for the most part it just comes off like arbitrary ranting and digressing…same as in Crawford. 

Another interesting character who initially seems important but ultimately becomes trivial is Gene DeBarry, a dashing reporter (he’s compared to a young Orson Welles) who lives in an entire apartment complex along the beach. Caidin has it that when all the “pink slips” were handed out at NASA after Apollo 11, real estate was cheap given how many fired employees left the Cape. DeBarry purchased an entire building and refitted into his own domain, continnuing to write about the space program here. His intro too makes us expect some kinky stuff, opening as it does with his nude girlfriend commenting on how the naked DeBarry’s balls look when he’s sitting down(!). DeBarry too could’ve made for a fine protagonist in a torrid melodrama about the space program, but he soon fades into the narrative woodwork. I did think his pad sounded super-cool in that late ‘60s way I so enjoy, though:

There are other characters as well, but most of them gradually hinge around Ben Rayburn, a Cape-based crime boss who acts as a liason for people engaged in various underground activities, and usually blackmails them for it. For example, we learn that Danny Stuart’s mistress is pregnant. They both decide on an abortion, and Stuart tells the girl he knows a guy named Ben Rayburn who could help set up something – like what doctor they could use, or where they could go to have it done discreetly. Then we flash over to Houston, where Danny’s wife Dee suspects her husband of being a cheater. She decides to hire a Cape-based private eye to shadow him…and the name she’s given for the job is Ben Rayburn. Thus Rayburn is hired separately by both husband and wife, and ultimately uses this to blackmail Stuart. But even this is only a minor distubrance in the narrative, and even here Caidin fails to deliver on the dramatic potential. Danny Stuart pretty much disappears from the text after his intro! 

Rather, the focus is on a panoply of characters and the fact that the CIA et al suspect the Reds are going to sabotage the Skylab launch. Worse yet, intel has it that one of the top men at NASA is a traitor. This suspense angle becomes the impetus of the plot, which plays out over a week. Curtis doesn’t take the info seriously, claiming that there have been sabotage warnings on every prior launch, but soon gets the vibe that this one might be legit. At one point he comes up with the novel idea to use the recently-hired “Negro” engineers at NASA as undercover monitors to ferret out Reds, figuring they’d be less capable of treason than the Germans who came over to NASA after WWII. 

Speaking of which there’s a whole bunch of stuff here that readers today (and even in 1971) would find unpleasant, like Curtis “jokingly” referring to his black colleague by the dreaded N-word. For that matter, when villain Gene Clayburn later finds out that one of his hookers had sex with one of the black engineers, he goes ballistic: “You balled the jig?!” I know that’s racist and all, but it made me laugh to think how younger readers of today probably wouldn’t understand what the sentence even means. They’d probably think it was some new dance move. That said, Rayburn goes on to beat the woman unmerciful for it. As for the other “inappropriate today” stuff, I did enjoy how the novel took place in a working world in which Human Resources hadn’t yet been invented; as mentioned secretary Ginny enjoys giving her boss rubdowns, and there’s a bunch of smoking and drinking in the office. 

The Cape slowly builds up steam as various government agents come on the scene to help figure out the sabotage plot. I got another postmodern chuckle out of how one of them, a notorious killer, had the last name Clinton. That Cartel’s everywhere, man! But it’s all just so static and listless. The finale is pretty apocalyptic, though, with the massive Vehicle Assembly Building nearly being destroyed in a planned explosion. This part was an almost eerie prediction of 9/11, with thousands of employees in the building losing their life in the destruction. But Curtis pushes on with the Skylab launch, leading to a anticlimactic finale in which the main villain is outed – though this is a nice bit of misdirection from Caidin, who has us suspecting someone else. 

It’s no mystery why The Cape failed to make any traction. Caidin does himself no favors by turning in an un-thrilling thriller. Also I’d say public interest in the space race was at its lowest around this time; Caidin does mention the same thing in his novel, but also has the Russians still in open competition with the US, which at least still lends the launches and whatnot a little public awareness. In reality though the Russians had pretty much thrown in the towel at this point. At any rate, The Cape only received this original 374-page hardcover edition, and as mentioned it’s now pricey like most of Caidin’s other novels are. If you still want to read it, just do what I did and request it via Interlibrary Loan.

No Man’s World

No Man’s World, by Martin Caidin

No month stated, 1967  E.P. Dutton

Part of a sequence of Space Race novels Martin Caidin published in the ‘60s and early ‘70s,* No Man’s World takes place in the then-future year of 1971: Russia has won the race, first landing on the moon in 1968 and setting up a lunar base “for the enrichment of the entire world.” Meanwhile the United States is still struggling to keep up, and the novel concerns the first-ever Apollo lunar mission, the objective being to set foot on the moon and get America back into the game. 

Caidin then is just projecting out the early years of the Space Race; as anyone who studies the subject knows, Russia really trounced the US when all this first began. First with Sputnik, then with various men and women in space. Younger people today probably don’t realize how huge President Kennedy’s challenge to the nation was in 1961: to get a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Having been born in 1974 and thus after all of it happened, I personally didn’t realize how big of a feat it was until I started getting into the subject. But when Kennedy made his challenge, America was in a serious game of catch-up with Russia. Getting a man on the moon seemed like an impossible task, given that America hadn’t even gotten a man in orbit yet. 

Of course as reality panned out, America slowly but surely caught up with Russia and then overtook it, just as President Kennedy had said would happen. Caidin, writing in the mid-1960s, is conservative in his predictions: he doesn’t see America launching a successful lunar bid until 1971. Reality would soon prove Caidin’s predictions too conservative, with the Russians not only never even making it to the moon but Americans going there a handful of times by the late ‘60s, with a few more trips in the early ‘70s. It’s curious that Caidin was so conservative in this regard, but I’m betting he was writing when the Gemini Program got started, thus he had no idea how successful (and quick-moving) the program would be. For in fairly short order NASA not only caught up with Russia but surpassed it. 

No Man’s World clearly didn’t make much of an impact on the reading public, as it only received this hardcover edition. It’s way overpriced on the used books marketplace, too, so I had to get it via Interlibrary Loan. Plus I had to request an extension on my hold, as this is a doorstop of a book, 414 pages of small and dense print. I know, 414 pages doesn’t sound like a lot, but I think with bigger print and less “stuffed” layout this book would probably come in closer to 600 pages. In a way it’s almost a prefigure of Tom Clancy’s doorstop techno-thrillers; while ostensibly No Man’s World is about the first American lunar launch, it also encompasses polticial infighting, espionage, and even melodrama in a love-triangle subplot. 

The first fifty pages are pretty hard going, and doubtless turned off a lot of readers of the day. We meet Colonel Lev Barkagan, commandant of the USSR lunar colony, the man to have lived longest on the moon – there 3 years, and commanding the base ever since. The moon is a harsh climate that he hates, and there’s lots of buzzkilling here with all the men stinking and the monotonous toil of living on the moon. There are twenty-seven cosmonauts in the base, and many have died on the way here and during their stay. This interminable opening describes the hellish moon and Barkagan’s methods to survive on it. It possibly gave readers of the day the impression that the main characters would all be Russians…lots of backstory to Barkagan’s start as cosmonaut in 1961, his first space trips, training at the lunar training ground, and finally the trials and tribulations of the lunar base cosmonauts. A lot of Russian names and backstories are thrown at us at once. 

Things pick up significantly with the introduction of our Apollo crew: Commander Rance Allenby, Command Module Pilot Gene Stanley, and Scientist Leigh “The Brain” Raymond. Allenby and Stanley are cut from the same cloth as their real-life counterparts: veteran flyboys who have made the jump over to the space program. Allenby started in the Gemini years, and Stanley a little later; he also happens to be a ‘Nam vet, whereas most of the real-life Gemini and Apollo guys had been in Korea. As for Raymond, he’s a scientist, one who learned to fly so as to become an astronaut. According to Tom Wolfe, this means he could never achieve “The Right Stuff,” but regardless the other astronauts respect him…even though Raymond has a monumental ego. In fact we have a long flashback to how his wife learned to hate him, given his complete disregard for other people. This element of characterization, so heavily built up in the opening chapters, is basically dropped. 

No Man’s World is almost as much a technical manual as it is a novel. Caidin thoroughly – one might even say pedantically – spells out the entire operation of the Apollo craft, from launch to lunar landing. But in hindsight I realized that it was only in later years that all this would seem routine; Americans became used to Apollo launches in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s, but this novel was published before an Apollo or Saturn V rocket even had a public launch. In fact, Caidin was likely writing in ’66 or earlier, so before the Apollo 1 disaster, which isn’t mentioned anywhere in the novel. Thus Caidin was writing speculative fiction in this regard, based off what he knew was coming with the Apollo program. For that matter, the ship is constantly just referred to as “Apollo,” with no numerical designation as with the real launches, and also there’s no naming convention for the command service module or the lunar module (ie Columbia, Eagle). 

Another indication of when Caidin was writing is that Rance Allenby is given a backstory – clunkily delivered in expository dialog by Stanley – that mirrors the real-life Gemini 8 mission with Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott. Just as their Gemini almost crashed after docking with an Agina station in orbit, so too did Allenby’s. Also, Allenby’s career trajectory is very similar to Armstrong’s: he started flying at a young age, served as a decorated fighter pilot in Korea, then turned his hand to test piloting before entering NASA with the beginning of the Gemini Program. (All this too is delivered in clunky exposition!) Allenby’s backstory diverges from Armstrong’s in the personal arena, though; in another clunkily-delivered bit of backstory, we learn that he married his college sweetheart, had a son with her….and then she died in a freak skydiving accident! This bit was so random it made me laugh out loud. It’s made even worse because it’s all relayed via a dream sequence, Allenby sleeping on Apollo and flashing back to the event several years before where his wife decided to surprise her family at an airshow, having taken secret skydiving lessons and looking to give them a big surprise, but her parachute failed and she plummeted to her death. 

All this is relayed in backstory and exposition as “Apollo” rockets toward the moon, with arbitrary digressions on this or that and a lot of technical stuff. Finally around page 200 things pick up(!). The first steps on the moon are pretty interesting. In this reality, Russia’s already been on the moon for three years; Allenby and Raymond even see their lunar monorail in action as they glide over the surface to land. Per Houston, Allenby is to take the first steps on the moon, as commander of the mission. But when they land Allenby pulls rank and tells Houston there’s a change of plans, that Raymond will be first. Houston acknowledges that Allenby has the control, as he’s up there and they are down on Earth. Allenby as it turns out has no interest in being remembered in the history books; he explains to Raymond that because the Soviets are already here, America’s lost the moon race. Their only chance to make a big statement for the world is for the first “astronaut-scientist” on the moon be an American. So he requests that Brain hoist an American flag and venture down on the lunar surface and announce, to the TV camera beaming this back to millions on Earth, “For God and country.” 

So this is another curious projection of Caidin’s. In reality, Harrison Schmitt was the first scientist to walk on the moon, on the Apollo 17 mission. Who today could name him? But I guess in Caidin’s imagination this was the only way America could at least get one big development over the Russians; there’s a subplot, not much explored, where a military general bitches at a congressman that America could’ve had a shot at being first on the moon if not for budget fights and restrictions. I don’t see this entire “race to be second” as believable, though. It doesn’t fit the American spirit (or at least the American spirit that once existed). If Russia did get to the moon first, the US would’ve strived to get there sooner than three years later, at least. Caidin tries to work up an underdog sort of spirit to the entire Apollo program here, but it’s just not believable, particularly when the astronauts themselves are dispirited about the situation. 

Caidin brings a tense Cold War element into the tale with the wily Russians “going silent” upon the American landing on the moon; soon thereafter Moscow releases a statement that it’s lost all communications with the lunar colony. And yes, that’s “colony;” the Russians of course have claimed the moon for themselves, given that they’ve landed here first. Meanwhile on the moon, the lunar bug is surrounded by three “Cats,” massive vehicles the Russians use to get around on the moon; they sound very much like the vehicles seen in Moon Zero Two. Allenby again bucks Houston by insisting that both he and the Brain will go out to talk to them, disregarding Mission Control’s orders that one person stay in the lunar craft. But the two are given a frosty reception, Colonel Barkagan flatly announcing that the moon is Russian territory and they are trespassing. 

Barkagan orders Allenby and Raymond to get back in their lunar lander and join up with Stanley on the command module, which will be passing overhead in 45 minutes. Raymond proves he’s not just a meek scientist when he challenges Barkagan, the “low gravity” rifles his men bears notwithstanding. Allenby has to tell him to stand down, leading to a lot of hostility between the two crewmembers; Allenby is “yellow” per Raymond, who is in disbelief when the commander “puts his tail between his legs” and gives in to the Russian demands. This after Barkagan’s men have even broken apart the American flag Raymond just planted. So they return to Earth in great dispirits, Allenby reasoning with Raymond that it was a losing proposition; the Russians weren’t bluffing, and the whole world heard what happened via the radio link. 

After this things get lame again. Incredibly, we’re faced with overlong chapters in which various characters exposit and exposit, from newcasters (who go on in pages and pages of unbroken dialog) informing us of developing situations to even a part where the Russians argue their case at the UN. Finally things sort of build up again when NASA decides to go in a venture with the UN and scrub “United States” off the next Saturn launch and put “United Nations” on it, so as to poke the Russians a bit – see if they’re still so cocky to challenge when the astronauts represent “all nations” and not just the US. Rance and his military pals are chagrined by this; there’s a fair bit of UN hatred here, in particular how it caves under any pressure and will be quick to turn its back on the US. So I guess that was a thing even in the ‘60s! 

But as Allenby said, the Russians aren’t bluffing, and this next NASA crew meets with trouble: Barkagan has his men cut down the commander when he refuses to leave the moon. The scientist-astronaut is taken prisoner. Things are finally coming to a boil. But Caidin cuts back to Earth and puts the brakes on again. At this point a major character commits suicide…and we learn about it from a letter Allenby is sent. This is Caidin’s approach to writing in a nutshell. We already had a bit of backstory devoted to this character at novel’s beginning…backstory that didn’t pan out…after which the character was sort of relegated to secondary status, only to end up offing himself, uh, off-page. One would think that important dramatic developments like this would warrant more narrative space than UN speechifying or newscaster blathering. 

Things again threaten to pick up when Allenby and an Air Force general begin to roll out a massive operation, in which a veritable armada of Saturn rockets blast into the sky, even setting up a space station in “Polar orbit” so that more ships can be quickly assembled for a military assault on the moon. But there’s also some subterfuge afoot, as the Americans successfully fool the Russians that they have more men on the moon than they actually do. This time however the US heads for the dark side of the moon, claiming this area for themselves and thus provoking the Russian bear. Barkagan eventually assembles his Cats and makes his way over there, leading to a skirmish that’s almost altogether ruined by Caidin’s prose style; there’s absolutely nothing thrilling or gripping about it. But by skirmish’s end both Allenby’s team and Barkagan’s team must work together, to either “die separately or live together.” 

The novel ends with Caidin introducing a new element: while Barkagan and Allenby have learned to work together, the Red Chinese meanwhile throw their hat in the space ring and nuke the Russian base, then go about challenging the US position with their own space launches. Rather than get into a major world war, everyone decides to back off from the moon, though Allenby and Barkagan are already looking to Mars as the next desitnation. And with this, mercifully, No Man’s World finally comes to a close. 

Now, as for Caidin’s prose. I think I used the word “clunky” a few times above, and I’ll use it again here. I’ve said it before, but this guy’s prose reads almost identically to that of Mark Roberts or William Crawford. Everything from sentence construction to reliance on exposition, not to mention the obsession with all things aeronautical. Caidin was a sort of infamous pilot himself, so it’s possible he was friends with fellow pilots Roberts and Crawford, or at least knew of them. But Mark Roberts was fond of incorporating the names of his friends in his books, as he did with Crawford in The Penetrator #9; I’ve yet to see a Roberts novel in which Caidin is mentioned. Anyway, given that Caidin was publishing earlier than these two I’m going to assume they were just greatly influenced by his style. 

All of which is to say Caidin’s writing leaves a little to be desired. The reliance on exposition is bad enough, but the overly-thorough technical stuff gets to be a drag, too. It also doesn’t help that he introduces interesting touches but fails to follow up on them. For example, we learn that the Brain’s wife hates him, and is in love with Allenby, but this doesn’t amount to much in the narrative. Same goes for various minor characters who are introduced at great narrative expense but who soon disappear from the text. In most cases it just comes off like Caidin showing off, like the newscaster who drones on and on for his report on the American lunar landing, but before we even get to it we have a lot of interminable background about his start as a reporter and what all he learned about the space program and whatnot. Unfortunately this stuff takes precedence over telling a gripping story with compelling characters. And some of the sentences are incredibly awkward, ie “[Allenby] annointed his inner pain by melting into the intricacies of the space-time velocity vector that would boost them out of lunar orbit to begin the long journey Earthward.” 

As mentioned, No Man’s World only received this hardcover edition, and it’s pretty evident why. It seems to be pretty much forgotten today, with not even a scanned version on the Internet Archive. So if you’re interested, do what I did and request it via Interlibrary Loan. Just don’t pay the exorbitant amount online booksellers are asking.

*The others being Marooned (first published in 1964, then revised as a film tie-in in 1969), Four Came Back (1968), and The Cape (1971).