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.

The Right Stuff: Illustrated

The Right Stuff: Illustrated, by Tom Wolfe

No month stated, 2004  Black Dog & Leventhal

Many years ago I was obsessed with “New Journalism,” ie that genre of journalism that brought elements of fiction to nonfiction. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was my introduction; I picked up a paperback edition of it in 1998 and read it at work, and really enjoyed it. From there I picked up more of Wolfe’s books, including his The New Journalism anthology of other writers. And of course Hunter Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was another of my favorites; I even sought out obscure stuff like Joe Ezsterhas’s Nark, culled like Thompson’s book from the pages of Rolling Stone, but not nearly as frenetic. 

Well anyway, despite my obsession I still never picked up The Right Stuff, which arguably was Wolfe’s most famous piece of New Journalism. Hell, I’d never even seen the movie. I was certainly aware of both the book and the film, though, but neither captured my interest because I knew the story concerned the earliest days of the Space Race. In fact, I was under the impression that the majority of The Right Stuff wasn’t even about space, but about the fighter jocks who preceded the entire space program. I’ve always been interested in space subjects, but I preferred something later, at least the Gemini era, so I just never sought out The Right Stuff. 

This of course has turned out to be my mistake, as the book is just as great as its legend would have you believe. And also, while it does focus on the early years of the Space Race, The Right Stuff only slightly focuses on the fighter jocks of the ‘40s and ‘50s. I finally got around to watching the film before I read the book, and the film is misleading in this regard; the film puts a lot more focus on Chuck Yeager and the test pilot program than the book itself does. As it turns out, the test pilot material is only at the beginning of the book, after which we get into the meat of the story: the training and eventual missions of the Mercury Seven, ie the seven military pilots who were ultimately chosen to be the first Americans in space. Yeager disappears throughout the majority of this, only to return in a gripping final chapter. 

Speaking of Rolling Stone, The Right Stuff started as an assignment Wolfe wrote for the magazine, which was published as “Post-Orbital Remorse.” You’ll often read that this piece was transformed into The Right Stuff, but now that I’ve read both I can tell you that hardly any of “Post-Orbital Remorse” is in The Right Stuff. For one, that earlier piece is written in an entirely different tone, with Wolfe himself the audience of the “collective voice of the astronauts,” and many of the stories concern Apollo missions. None of this is in The Right Stuff; Wolfe does not appear, and there is no collective astronaut voice. In fact it is told very much like a novel, only one with the typically hyperkinetic Tom Wolfe narrative style. And also there is absolutely no foreshadowing to the Apollo era; it is almost a real-time documentation of the period in which it is set, namely the late 1950s through the early 1960s. 

It's kind of suprising that The Right Stuff was such a hit. Maybe it’s because the book isn’t like your typical dry piece of nonfiction. Wolfe has clearly done his research, and met with many of the astronauts and their wives, but his usual tendency for exaggeration is in place, and there are no footnotes or anything to provide further details. But then those dry nonfiction books don’t feature grand setpieces like Wolfe delivers throughout the novel, many of which are courtesy his own gifted imagination. Take for example the flight of Ham, a chimp who was trained rigorously to handle a sub-orbital flight before an actual human (Alan Shepard) was sent up. This entire sequence of Ham being sent up is gripping and hilarious – and it’s entirely from the perspective of Ham himself. His thoughts and feelings and fears, up to the laugh out loud moment at the end where he’s taken out to the press pool to be photographed and thinks these photographers are more humans who are going to strap him up and put him through more grueling tests (“Fuck this!”). It’s some incredbile writing for sure, but obviously there’s no way anyone could know what Ham was thinking during the mission; it’s all Wolfe’s imagination, and it’s a lot of fun. Just one wonderful sequence in a book chock full of them. 

It’s my understanding that most of the astronauts themselves appreciated The Right Stuff (though hardly any of them liked the movie), save for one thing: Wolfe’s character assassination of Virgil “Gus” Grissom. In a sequence that still sets the purists off, Wolfe has it that Grissom “screwed the pooch” upon the return from his own suborbital flight, accidentally hitting the escape button and ultimately losing his own capsule, which sunk in the ocean. Wolfe builds up several charges in his case: Grissom was loaded down with coins and such that he wanted to take on his ride and sell later, and also he likely stood up to take the survival knife mounted inside the capsule as another souvenier – and it was mounted right beside the escape switch. Grissom died in the Apollo 1 disaster of 1967, so wasn’t around to defend his case when this book was published years later. However even in his own day he was exonerated: fellow Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra did in fact hit the escape switch, and it hurt like hell, leaving a bruise on his hand. There was no such bruising on Grissom. Wolfe doesn’t mention any of this; reading the book you get the impression that Gus Grissom was a screwup. 

I thought about this for a while, and finally I think I figured out what was going on. There was a reason, I felt, that Wolfe was overlooking all this and making Gus Grissom look like a bad guy. And that reason, I’m sure, is that Wolfe himself just didn’t like Gus. In the book Wolfe skillfully paints a portrait of each of the astronauts, and Grissom’s isn’t very flattering: he’s never home, he’s always ditching his wife and kids (even when they’re just a few miles away), and he’s kind of slow-witted. Wolfe also develops the theme that there is a rivalry within the Mercury Seven: on the one side there’s Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, and Gordon Cooper, and on the other side there’s John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. The rivalry mostly begins over “cookies,” ie the groupies who would flock around the astronauts. While the other astronauts thought this was just a fun perk, Glenn and Carpenter were sort of against the idea. 

Now, a curious thing about The Right Stuff is that the tone in it is very pro-American, very much what one might today deem “reactionary.” This is very surprising, given that it’s courtesy a Rolling Stone contributor. It becomes clear that Wolfe himself is on the side of Glenn and Carpenter. This is most obviously demonstrated because he keeps referring to Carpenter as “Scott” in the narrative. Whereas the other astronauts are generally referred to by their last names – and Wolfe lacks consistency in this, which is kind of messy and should have been caught in the editing stage – Wolfe will usually just refer to Carpenter by his first name. This actually took me out of the narrative the first few times; I’d be reading about “Shepard” and “Glenn” and then I’d see “Scott,” and I’d have to pause and wonder, “Wait, which one was named Scott? Oh – Scott Carpenter!” 

One of the people Wolfe talked to during his research was Rene Carpenter, Scott Carpenter’s wife; I know this because you hear a bit of their 1973 interview in the 2020 documentary The Real Right Stuff. Rene and Scott were divorced at the time of the interview, but I’m under the impression that Wolfe also talked to Scott Carpenter, and found himself liking the former couple. Thus, both Scott and Rene come off very well in The Right Stuff. Scott Carpenter in particular is presented as the “explorer of the new frontier” that none of the other Mercury astronauts were, using his mission to investigate and relate back on his findings, often ignoring his real objectives – even up to the point that he ran out of fuel and was nearly lost in the return to Earth. Due to this he so pissed off the higher ups at NASA that Scott Carpenter never went into space again. And, Wolfe implies, this “ban from space” was also courtesy the rival click of astronauts, who went out of their way to imply that Grissom’s mission, despite the loss of the friggin’ capsule, was a success and Carpenter’s was a failure. 

But Wolfe builds up the case that Scott Carpenter was actually a superior astronaut to Gus Grissom: his heart rate and blood pressure never skyrocketed, even during the shaky return to Earth. Meanwhile, Grissom’s was soaring in all the tense spots. But the Shepard-Grissom-Slayton-Schirra-Cooper click was against Carpenter and Glenn. They couldn’t do anything about Glenn, who’d driven them nuts with his goody-goody nature during training; his orbital flight made him a hero, second only to the President in the unofficial power structure. But Carpenter wasn’t as famous, and Wolfe makes it clear that he was the sacrificial lamb that made Grissom look good; while Carpenter was drummed out of the program, despite having all the “right stuff,” Grissom was allowed to stay on, despite losing his capsule and not displaying the right stuff (ie the racing heart rate and soaring blood pressure). All this of course might not be a reflection of reality; I’m just going into it all to offer an explanation on why Tom Wolfe made Gus Grissom look so bad in The Right Stuff. It’s because he liked Scott Carpenter, and resented that Carpenter suffered for a “failure” while Grissom didn’t. 

Regardless, this is a great book. It’s history made exciting. There are so many memorable moments, from the bizarre and hilarious training the pilots go through as part of the astronaut selection to the indidivual trips each takes into space. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, features in a bravura sequence where Wolfe, again in Shepard’s thoughts and feelings more so than “standard” nonfiction would dare to go, relates that it’s all sort of underwhelming…at least when compared to the training sequences! The John Glenn launch, orbit, and ensuing fanfare is also great, and the patriotism here, the love for the “single-combat warrior,” was so palpable that I felt myself almost getting as misty-eyed as the tough New York cops who wept openly during Glenn’s parade through the city. What’s interesting about the book is that it’s not hero-worship of the type Life doled out during the era itself…and yet it’s clear that Wolfe himself has immense respect for these men, and there’s none of the sting or satire he’d bring to previous subjects. Even Gus Grissom, all told, is presented in a fairly heroic lot, despite Wolfe’s clear intimation that he screwed the pooch. 

The story goes that Wolfe spent some years working on The Right Stuff; actually per an interview he did with Rolling Stone in 1980, Wolfe spent six years researching but only a few months writing, with more time taken to edit. His original goal was to cover the entire Space Race, from the era documented here in The Right Stuff all the way through the mid-‘70s Skylab missions. But, again so the story goes, by the time Wolfe finally finished The Right Stuff, his wife told him, “Congratulations, you’ve finished the book,” and Wolfe decided that he’d just let this be it and not spend more time on the rest of the program. You’d have to think, though, that at least at some point over the years Wolfe must’ve thought about returning to this topic. I mean The Right Stuff was published in 1979 and Wolfe died in 2018; that’s nearly 40 years in which he had the opportunity to revisit the subject and give us a sequel to The Right Stuff. 

Perhaps the book’s fame gave him pause; maybe he felt that whatever he wrote would always be considered in the shadow of The Right Stuff. Or maybe he just lost interest. Whatever the reason, it’s literature’s loss that Tom Wolfe never wrote the epic he originally envisioned. Who knows how great some multi-volume work might have been, with The Right Stuff merely the first installment. There are bits and pieces throughout that indicate Wolfe originally planned the book as just the first part of his chronicle; for example, the first lead character we meet is Pete Conrad, a test pilot with an awesome sense of humor who tries out for the program but ultimately isn’t chosen – no doubt due to that time he took his colostomy bag into the general’s office and complained about all the intrusive tests that were part of the selection process. Conrad then disappears from the book, only to appear again toward the very end, as one of the “New Nine” astronauts who have been chosen for the Gemini program. Conrad would’ve been a bigger character in ensuing volumes, as he commanded the Apollo 12 mission to the moon. None of this is even intimated in The Right Stuff, and it seems clear that it’s because Wolfe figured he’d document it in the next volume. 

Then there’s Alan Shepard, one of the main figures in The Right Stuff. We only learn toward the end that an ear issue takes him out of the program, but again there’s no intimation that within a few years he would return to the fold, and ultimately go to the moon himself. For that matter, Neil Armstrong is barely a presence in the book; first we have a random mention of a pilot seat at Edwards Air Force Base with “N. Amrstrong” on it, and then much later in the book he too is casually mentioned as one of the New Nine. And while Wolfe never states that Amrstrong will be the first on the moon, he does try to compare him unfavorably to Chuck Yeager. Personally I’d say Armstrong, with his war record and test pilot skills, had more of “the right stuff” than any of the other pilots in the book. But Wolfe details a sequence where Armstrong, who has a tendency to rely on data and thus represents “the new breed” of test pilot, comes off poorly compared to flying vet Yeager: Armstrong wants to do a trial run on a certain river bed, which per the reports should be dry enough to land on, but Yeager insists, through nothing more than his own experience, that the river bed won’t be dry enough. And sure enough he’s proven correct, with the two of them stuck in the mud. One can almost hear the goofy “wah-wah-waaaah” on the soundtrack. 

So then “Post-Orbital Remorse” is the sequel to The Right Stuff that we never got. It’s a heck of a lot shorter, and some of it is a retread of material mentioned in The Right Stuff, but it also features a lot of stuff on later Apollo missions, up to and even including Edgar Mitchell’s ESP experiments on Apollo 14. Mitchell isn’t even mentioned in The Right Stuff, yet in “Post-Orbital Remorse” we’re informed he has “the Rightest Stuff of all,” with a war and test pilot record that outdid anyone’s…despite which he turned out to be the most “unusual” of all the astronauts, performing ESP tests with collagues back on Earth. Mitchell isn’t in The Right Stuff, but given the focus on him in “Post-Orbital Remorse” one can only assume he would’ve had a bigger role in the sequel(s) Wolfe unfortunately never wrote. 

What’s curious is that “Post-Orbital Remorse” has never been reprinted. You’d think at least one of the innumerable editions of The Right Stuff would feature it as an appendix, but as far as I know none of them have. It hasn’t even appeared in a Wolfe anthology to my knowledge. But as I mentioned in the link above, you can actually download a PDF of the entire article here, and it’s highly recommended reading for anyone who enjoyed The Right Stuff. It covers some of the same Mercury Seven material (though not as elaborate or comprehensive), but it also dwells on the actual flights to the moon and the experiences the astronauts went through on the lunar surface and upon their return home. I’m of the opinion that Wolfe would’ve titled his sequel (or at least the Apollo volume, if he was indeed going to do a separate volume on Gemini) “Post-Orbital Remorse,” but that’s just my suspicion. Wolfe talked to several of the astronauts and other NASA people for his research, so who knows what other stories he had set aside for future volumes; given that Pete Conrad supplied him with so much of the early section of The Right Stuff, I can only imagine what other similarly-ribald stuff Conrad might’ve divulged about the Gemini and Apollo eras. 

Given the fame of The Right Stuff, I’ll end my usual overly-comprehensive rundown and focus instead on this particular edition. This summer I picked up Moonfire, a Taschen Books abridgement of Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon that was, in typical Taschen style, stuffed to the gills with photography. I went on the hunt for something similar, and discovered this obscure “illustrated” edition of The Right Stuff. I say obscure because I could hardly find anything out about it; there are about a zillion reviews of The Right Stuff online, but none for this particular edition. I wanted something that would be a feast for the eyes as Moonfire had been, and thus finally decided to give The Right Stuff a read. Luckily this illustrated edition can be found relatively inexpensive online. 

In a nutshell, The Right Stuff: Illustrated is the reverse of Taschen’s Moonfire: the narrative is incredible but the photos are subpar. No disrespect to those at Black Dog & Leventhal who put this book together, but this illustrated edition is somewhat of a missed opportunity. Whreas Moonfire contains dazzling full-color photos, mostly taken from Life Magazine, The Right Stuff: Illustrated is mainly comrpised of black and white shots, hardly any of them displaying the artistic finesse of those Life shots. And for that matter, Life featured a ton of photos of the Mercury Seven astronauts and their training, the majority of them taken by gifted photographer Ralph Morse, and any number of them would’ve been perfect for this book. And yet, hardly any of them are here. Indeed, you will find better full-color photos of the Mercury Seven era in Moonfire, even though the Mercury Seven astronauts are not the focus of that book. On the other hand, the shots here do the job and provide photographic documentation of the people, places, and things discussed in the book. And also, at least the publishers didn’t put photos over two pages so that the spine would jack up the image, as Taschen did. 

So far as other production issues go with The Right Stuff: Illustrated, it’s worth mentioning that there are occasional typos in the book. Otherwise, the narrative is printed on double-columned pages; The Right Stuff is longer than I thought it would be, coming in at 304 pages of dense, double-columned print. I took my time reading the book; each morning I’d get up with my kid, give him his breakfast, and sit on the couch and read a few pages while he played. He’d come over and look at the book occasionally; he got a big kick out of the photo of Ham the astrochimp (below). That picture really cracked him up for some reason. I was sorry to see The Right Stuff come to an end, and wished someone out there had done a similar approach to the Gemini and/or Apollo eras, but it doesn’t look like anyone has. So in the end I decided on Andrew Chaikin’s well-regarded A Man On The Moon (1994) as my next Space Race book; it doesn’t appear to have the literary verve of The Right Stuff, but makes up for it by being a very comprehensive study of the Apollo missions. And, like Wolfe, Chaikin met with many (if not all) of the surviving Apollo astronauts as part of his research. 

Now, on to some photos – these are just random examples of what you’ll find in The Right Stuff: Illustrated. While the photos themselves are somewhat lacking, at least when compared to the ones in Moonfire, the book itself is one of the greatest things I’ve ever read.

Moonfire (aka Of A Fire On The Moon)

Moonfire, by Norman Mailer

No month stated, 2019  Taschen

First published over three issues of Life Magazine in the summer of 1969 and then released in hardcover soon thereafter, Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire On The Moon seems to be overlooked today, and might even have been overlooked at the time, given the rapid expiration date of interest in the Space Race. In fact I read somewhere that the publisher was surprised at how little interest there was in the hardcover edition, which came out just a few months after the Apollo 11 moon landing of July 1969; already by then the public had virtually no interest in the subject. 

The title of Mailer’s unexpurgated work is Of A Fire On The Moon, but under discussion here is Moonfire, Taschen’s abridgement of Mailer’s book that is chock full of some of the greatest space race photos I’ve ever seen, most of them from contemporary issues of Life. Simply put, this little hardcover (larger than a mass market paperback but smaller than a trade paperback) is one of the most visually stunning books I’ve ever had the pleasure to own. Usually I steer clear of abdriged books – I prefer to read the full monty, as it were – but in this case Taschen’s editors have done a fine job whittling down Mailer’s incessant navel-gazing and just sticking to what most readers are here for: a bird’s eye peek at NASA at its height, and a great picture of the era in which the first moon landing occurred. 

Actually, Of A Fire On The Moon, particularly in this illustrated “Moonfire” edition, is just as much a picture of its era as the similar-in-spirit contemporary documentary Moonwalk One. The touch of Stanley Kubrick is very evident, from Mailer’s own obsessive musings on the nature of the moon voyage to the incredible photographs that grace the book, in particular the ones by Life photographer Ralph Morse. Humorously, the Signet paperback of Of A Fire On The Moon features a blurb on the opening page which states that Mailer’s book is “The closest thing to 2001 yet produced by an important writer.” I’m sure Arthur C. Clarke really appreciated that! While Mailer doesn’t go as far as Moonwalk One on the “future shock” angle, he definitely captures the vibe in the early sequences in which he visits the NASA centers in Florida and Texas. 

At the end of the post I’ll feature a few random pages from Moonfire, but be aware this is just a scratching of the surface. I don’t exaggerate when I say that the book is stuffed with incredible photographic work, the vast majority of it in those wonderful eye-popping colors of the era. Again it’s the photography of Ralph Morse that really stands out, and I was surprised to find that there hasn’t been a book devoted solely to his NASA photography. He gets some photos that are downright Kubrickrian, in particular a shot of Apollo 11 command module pilot Mike Collins eating breakfast with his wife that looks like it could’ve come right out of 2001 (included below). In my opinion, the first half of Moonfire has the best photos, as they’re all in this spirit, staged shots of the astronauts in training or going about their daily lives. But once the narrative moves to the moon voyage the photos follow suit, the majority of them being ones the astronauts themselves took on the voyage and on the moon. So, certainly important from a historical perspective, but lacking the stylistic finesse of the earlier photos. 

Mailer writes in the New Journalism style that was becoming popular at the time, but Moonfire can in no way be confused with another New Journalism look at the space race: Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. Whereas Wolfe still employs New Journalism techniques, he for the most part tells history, whereas Moonfire is mostly concerned with Mailer himself, and his impressions of things. It takes an ego of staggering proportions to write about the moon landing and make it about yourself, especially if you had absolutely nothing to do with the moon landing. And Mailer’s ego is in full effect throughout, to the point that I actually started to admire the arrogant self-strokery. In this regard Moonfire/Of A Fire On The Moon is almost like the “nonfiction” works of the Classical Age, ie Pausanias’s Description Of Greece, in which everything is filtered through the writer’s own thoughts and feelings. 

The writing is, however, very rich, and practically every page offers a line crying out to be included in a book of quotations. Mailer is also very insightful with what he divines about the cast of characters at NASA; his breakdown of the Apollo 11 crew, at a press conference a few days before launch, is one of the highlights of the book. Here he gives his opinion on each member: overly reserved Neil Armstrong could either be “the best boy in town” or the creep mothers warn their infant daughters to shut the door on, Buzz Aldrin is a man of grit and gristle who measures everything in physical terms, and Mike Collins is “the man everyone is happy to see at the party.” The stuff on Collins I found especially insightful as it’s the same thing I’ve noticed about the guy, just judging from his documentary appearances, most notably In The Shadow Of The Moon. Curiously though Mailer never meets any of the crew, even though he apparently has the chance to; in this regard he’s again similar to Theo Kamecke, director of Moonwalk One, who per his comments in the special features of the DVD states that he was given the option of interviewing the crew for his documentary, but chose to keep them afar. 

Interestingly, throughout Mailer notes on the lack of “heroism” apparent in the Apollo 11 crew, and NASA in general. None of these space figures seem willing to square their shoulders and look back into the adoring gazes of the public and bask in their accomplishments. Armstrong in particular is so reserved that Mailer spends pages and pages bitching about it – that, and the lack of emotions displayed by Armstrong and Aldrin. Collins again comes to the rescue; his pithy asides at press conferences, Mailer assures us, made him a sudden favorite of the “newsmen” covering the scene. Mailer also captures the oldschool journalism vibe; throughout he refers to fellow newsmen, all of them hardbitten veterans who are prone to making sarcastic asides on their way to the free booze stand. I’d subscribe to the friggin’ New York Times if such newsmen could come back today. But anyway, Mailer unwittingly was in the presence of the Apollo era’s most notorious jokester; early in the book Mailer relates that he’s at a barbecue with Pete Conrad, commander of Apollo 12 (and thus forgotten by history). If only Mailer had spent more time talking to Conrad, he might’ve found all the humor and jokery in the otherwise sterile world of NASA he could want; indeed, Conrad’s insights would end up fueling much of The Right Stuff. 

But for the most part, Mailer is too wrapped up in himself to notice much else. In some ways Moonfire comes off like a bloated prefigure of the Twitter feed of some self-obsessed modern neurotic. Mailer even gives himself a Twitter-esque handle: throughout he pretentiously refers to himself as “Aquarius.” This is in relation to his Zodiac sign, but I found it interesting because Aquarius is the very astrological age we are now moving into. The last time a procession of the equinoxes occurred, when Taurus became Pisces two thousand years ago, western culture was torn apart by a rabid ideology that was primed to destroy everything that didn’t fit in its worldview. Sound familiar? There are in fact a lot of parallels between Mailer’s era and our own; a later part has him visiting some friends who have the anti-Nixon paraphanalia that was ubuiquitous among the left at that time, and Mailer chaffes at this, that a political movement could only define itself by being against a particular person. Sound familiar? 

Well anyway, Mailer admits throughout his ignorance of the space race business, but in the second half of the book he puts his engineering background to use when speaking of the mechanics of the landing. It’s the first half that I most appreciated, with Mailer trying to get a grip on the NASA personnel but finding everything so antiseptic and sterile. There are a lot of asides on the lack of smell and whatnot; in fact the entire book is mostly made up of asides, sort of like one of my reviews. But when he sets his sights on a particular personality the book really takes off, and for a behind-the-scenes peek at NASA the book is very valuable. However Mailer skips any attempt at history, or background; Mercury and Gemini missions are dispensed with as afterthoughts, and the focus is on the “meaning” of voyaging to the moon. Not even what this might portend for the future, but what it might mean to the unconscious mind of man, or somesuch. 

As mentioned, Taschen did a very good job of cutting the fat. As I read Moonwalk I’d refer to the Signet edition of Of A Fire On The Moon to read the parts that were cut, and gradually I stopped referring to the Signet altogether. This is a book that truly benefitted from some editorial pruning. Taschen also rejiggered Mailer’s structure; there are some parts of Moonwalk that are moved forward in the text, which don’t appear until later in the original version. Sometimes the editing is a bit abrupt, with ellipses breaking off otherwise important scenes, but checking Of A Fire In The Moon in these cases I discovered that even here the editing was wise. 

So Mailer, or “Aquarius” I guess I should say, ventures to Cape Kennedy a few days before the launch of Apollo 11 and checks out the sights and attends a few press conferences. Here we get more valuable behind-the-scenes material. He witnesses the launch, noting how bored everyone seems in the stifling Florida heat until the rocket actually goes up – and here Mailer himself is moved by the spectacle. But yes, boredom is rife in Moonfire; Mailer makes it clear that many of the newsmen were just burned out with the waiting. In his view, not much was going on between Saturn V launches. This is especially clear after the launch, when Mailer heads to Mission Control in Houston and basically sits around with nothing to do but ponder more of his thoughts. 

One thing forgotten in today’s world, in which films from the moon landing are shown in documentaries, is that at the time viewers on TV saw nothing but a grayish-white screen as the astronauts landed on the moon. Mailer views the landing in a room with other reporters, and this is another highlight of the book, coming off like a proto Mystery Science Theater 3000. The newsmen, we learn, all make wisecracks as Armstrong and Aldrin bumble across the moon; some of the material, in their view, approaches a slapstick vibe. This part was very interesting in comparison to the tones of gravitas the moon landing is treated with in every single documentary. Mailer at one point even taps into the current obsession that it was all faked, musing to himself how easily this could be staged, with no one the wiser. He doesn’t believe it, though, and again his bigger concern is what this moon landing “means” for mankind. 

At this point things are getting interesting again, but after covering the moon landing Mailer decides to just take off. As improbable as it might sound, Mailer decides there isn’t anything much else to do here in Houston and heads home…watching the return and recovery on TV, like practically everyone else in the world. While we do get some material on the ensuing parades and hoopla, at this point Mailer detours into even more navel-gazing than before, going on about his failing marriage and whatnot. I’ll willingly admit that I skipped all this stuff. As I say, way too much of the book is about stuff unrelated to the moon landing, but when Mailer does write about it the book is rich with detail. And Mailer’s writing, as mentioned, is great throughout, doling out some unusual but memorable word-painting. He really brings to life the various NASA locales, and even his descriptions of the moon – gleaned from watching a blurry image on a small TV screen – make you feel like you’re there with Buzz and Neil. 

A lot of Moonfire is made up of bald transcripts, of the Apollo 11 crew talking to Mission Control, and here too Mailer gives a contemporary slant, forgotten today, that most people listening at the time had no idea what the hell anyone was talking about. There is a lot of unexpected humor in Moonfire, and a lot of it has to do with those newsmen trying to make heads or tails out of the cryptic techno-jargon that passes for communication in the world of NASA. Again what makes all this interesting is the historical perspective; Mailer’s book is unique in that, unlike the other quickie moon landing publications of the day, it doesn’t treat everything as a huge accomplishment, nor is it like later books that thoroughly cover the topic from a historical perspective. Unlike any of them, Moonfire gives a picture of what it was like to be in Cape Kennedy and Houston as it all was happening and trying to make sense of it all. 

After I read Moonfire I started to read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (also in an illustrated edition), and I have to say it’s a night and day difference between these two books. Whereas Mailer spends much of his book complaining about the lack of heroism at NASA, Wolfe goes back to the start and finds that heroism; indeed, “the right stuff” itself is a reference to all the things Mailer failed to detect in Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, and the others. Another big difference is that, while it’s of course written in his patented style, Wolfe does not insert himself into The Right Stuff, whereas Mailer’s all over his own book. In fact I have to say the dude’s pretty aware of his own feelings. So much of Moonfire is comprised of “Aquarius” noting how a sulk is coming on, or how some other incident affects him on a subconscious level or whatnot; the entire book is almost an exercise in casting everyday mundane things in a sort of profound metaphysical light. And that’s another element Moonfire has that The Right Stuff doesn’t: like the age in which it was written, it’s pretty psychedelic, and is likely the only book on the moon landing that mentions LSD and acid rock. 

So then, with Moonfire you get a lot of banal navel-gazing, a lot of complaining, and periodic bouts of valuable glimpses behind the scenes at NASA in July and August of 1969, as well as the mindset of the people who lived in Cape Kennedy and Houston. You don’t get much history, per se, but you get a glimpse of history as it’s being made. But most importantly, in this Taschen edition, which was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, you get a plethora of incredible photos. Here are just a few of them:

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.