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.