Martin Caidin - Fiction and Awards

Fiction and Awards

Caidin's 1964 novel Marooned tells the story of an American astronaut who is stranded in space and NASA's attempt to rescue him. The novel was the basis for the movie Marooned made in 1969. The movie starred Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus, and Gene Hackman.

He twice won the Aviation/Space Writers Association award as the outstanding author in the field of aviation. Among his other honors, he was made an honorary member of the U.S. Army's Golden Knights parachute demonstration team; flew for several months with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration squadron; and set the world record for the number of people deployed for a wing-walk — nineteen — on one wing of an airplane on November 14, 1981.

Caidin was one of the people involved in the rescue and resurrection of the Junkers Ju 52 No. 5489 that would become famous on the Warbird circuit as Iron Annie. He was one of the pilots who flew what will likely be the last-ever formation flight of B-17s across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to England (via Canada, the Azores and Portugal) in 1961, a trip that involved a near-miss with a submarine, a brawl with KGB agents, and just barely missing ending up in jail in Portugal, an epic trip he chronicled in his book Everything But the Flak. He wrote what has been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration as the standard aircraft manual for the Messerschmitt Bf 108. He flew as a pilot in the movie The War Lover. He was also one of a very few pilots ever to take a Junkers Ju-52 off in less than 400 feet.

Caidin's style of fiction focused on acceptable projections of technical innovations with political and social repercussions. In this respect, his work has some echo in the writing of Michael Crichton. One recurring theme is that of the cyborg — the melding of man and machine, epitomized in the use of replacement body parts called bionics. Caidin references bionics in his 1968 novel The God Machine, but most famously based his novel Cyborg (1972) on the concept. Cyborg became Caidin's most famous work when it was adapted for a top-rated television film in 1973 and formed the basis of the television series The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman. Caidin himself wrote three sequels to Cyborg —Operation Nuke, High Crystal and Cyborg IV — that differed considerably from the television series version. Years later, Caidin would revisit bionics in a tongue-in-cheek manner for his novel Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future (a reinvention of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) in which the title character is given bionic parts after being revived from a centuries-long coma. A remake of The Bionic Woman, titled Bionic Woman debuted on NBC in 2007; unlike the original series, on which Caidin was given screen credit for the series being "based on" Cyborg, no such credit was included in the 2007 series.

On page 82 of Caidin's novel, Cyborg IV (Warner Books: May 1976. Library of Congress # 74-80703), the character Steve Austin references Caidin's own previous novel, stating, "A friend of mine wrote about it — did you ever read the book, Marooned?"