Martin Caidin (1927-1997) was a prolific author and screenwriter specializing in Aviation, Aviation, History, and Historical and Speculative fiction. The author or coauthor of more than 50 books and over 1000 magazine articles, he was also well known as the most prominent chronicler of the "Warbird" enthusiasts who restore and fly classic military aircraft.
Unarguably One of Us, one of his hobbies before his death was assisting local groups (he lived in the greater Orlando, Florida area) of fans put on science fiction conventions by roping his friends among the sci fi community into attending as guests without them requiring huge paychecks to do it.
For the purposes of TV tropes, Martin Caidin is most recognizable for authoring the novels Cyborg (which both popularized the word and served as the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man and its derivatives) and Marooned, which was made into a 1969 movie starring Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus, and Gene Hackman. He also served as the English language coauthor/text polisher for Samurai, the memoirs of Ace Pilot Saburo Sakai.
His works provide examples of:
- Ace Pilot: There are examples of this in both of Caidin's WW2 novels:
- In The Last Dogfight, both Major Mitchell Ross USAAF and his Japanese opponent, Lt. Shigura Tanimoto, qualify as aces in both senses of the word: both have many more than the requisite five kills, and both are true masters of their airplanes and of aerial combat.
- In Whip, Captain Whip Russell takes the trope up a notch by becoming an ace in a bomber — a modified B-25 Mitchell.
- Ancient Astronauts: Mercilessly played with in High Crystal, the third Cyborg novel. Early on, the possibility is raised that the eponymous crystal is of extraterrestrial origin, and the Caya used it to accomplish their "impossible" engineering feats. Steve Austin turns out to be a determined skeptic on the subject and raises several devastating objections to the entire idea. Then they get to their goal in South America and find that the crystal really does seem to be beyond any known human technology, ancient or modern, and the temple holding it was apparently built some eighteen thousand years ago.note Its actual origin is never explained.
- Apparently Human Merfolk: In Aquarius Mission, the Ikeans are a race of humans who are adapted to live underwater. Who or what did the adapting isn't clear, although it almost certainly isn't a result of natural evolution.
- Artificial Limbs: The protagonist of Cyborg gets a number of artificial body parts, including an arm and both legs.
- Celebrity Paradox: In a Six Million Dollar Man tie-in novel written by Caidin, Steve Austin asks a friend if she ever read the book Marooned, which a friend of his wrote. She replies that she didn't, but she saw the movie.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Steve Austin fears this is going to happen to him in Cyborg. It almost happens literally in Cyborg IV, when he's sent back into space as the pilot of an experimental combat spacecraft. The spacecraft is operated via a direct Brain/Computer Interface, which is so powerful that when it's at full strength Austin no longer exists as an independent entity. He and the spacecraft are one. Since it's an experimental prototype being used only as an emergency measure, no one knows what will happen when the interface is turned off.
- Cyborg: Cyborg is built around this trope, and did much to bring the words "cyborg" and "bionic" into the popular consciousness.
- Does Not Know His Own Strength: In Cyborg, Steve Austin accidentally broke a man's wrist with his new bionic hand. Ironically, it was right after that man figured out that Austin's bionic hand had developed a feedback that would allow him to judge how much pressure he was exerting — once he got used to it.
- Electronic Eyes: Cyborg has a proto-version of the trope. Steve Austin's lost eye is replaced with a camera, but it's a mechanical camera that records onto microfilm, which has to be physically removed and processed at the end of a mission, and Austin can't actually see with it. Electronic cameras did exist when the novel was written, but were still at the stage where they were too large and heavy for a single person to carry, let alone fit into an eye socket.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: In High Crystal, the terrain that Steve Austin's expedition must cross to get from their makeshift airstrip to Temple Mountain is extremely difficult going: thick undergrowth, steep hillsides and a swift river to cross, and harboring a number of lethally dangerous animals and insects. The airstrip itself is at a dangerously high altitude and swept by unpredictable winds, so even the air is trying to kill them.
- Eye Scream: In Cyborg, Steve Austin's replacement eye is a camera which takes photographs onto microfilm, and has to be physically removed in order to obtain the microfilm and develop the photographs. During a mission in which Austin's survival is uncertain, he gives a female agent rather squicky instructions on how to remove the eye without having access to the bionics lab.
- Mobile-Suit Human: In Man-Fac the main character suffered crippling burns, and built a "Man-Facsimile" to allow him to get around. Although his body had been somewhat shriveled and shrunken by his injuries, the facsimile still needed to be of a very large man, seven feet tall or thereabouts, to fit him inside along with the mechanical muscles.
- Mayincatec: In High Crystal, Steve Austin leads an expedition into the high mountains of Central America to find a mysterious crystal which is thought to have been created by an ancient civilization called the Caya, a forerunner of the Maya.
- More Dakka: Whip features a squadron of B-25 bombers modified to carry twelve fixed 50-caliber machine guns in the nose, all firing straight ahead. This was enough firepower to sink a Japanese freighter or destroyer without using any bombs at all. Truth in Television: some real-life B-25s were modified this way, and they proved to be devastating in strafing attacks on Japanese ships and large ground targets such as bridges and airfields.
- Numbered Sequel: Cyborg had three sequels. #s 2 and 3 in the series had ordinary namesnote , but #4 was called Cyborg IV.
- Recycled In Space: Aquarius Mission inverts this trope: the mission of the submarine Sea Trench into an unexplored part of the ocean, in a book published at a time when the deep sea was sometimes called "inner space" and "the last frontier," has a strong whiff of Star Trek about it.
- Retcanon: Marooned featured a Project Mercury mission. Later editions matched up with the movie and featured a Apollo-style spacecraft.
- Sink the Lifeboats: In the finale of Whip, Whip Russell takes his squadron of B-25 gunships in low and slow to strafe survivors of an aerial attack on a Japanese troop convoy. Truth in Television: the battle in the book is based on the real-life Battle of the Bismarck Sea
, in which Allied fighters and bombers did strafe survivors to make sure that as few as possible were rescued. Today this would certainly be considered a war crime, but the Pacific War was not noted for strict adherence to "the rules of war" by either side. - Slap-Slap-Kiss: Two of the main characters in Aquarius Mission eventually find themselves attracted to each other after being at loggerheads since the moment they met. Also a major case of Opposites Attract: he's the commander of the US Navy submarine Sea Trench and thoroughly military, while she is the chief scientist of the expedition and so anti-military that she's disgusted to find out the Sea Trench is even carrying weapons.
- Squad Nickname: In Whip, Whip Russell's bomber squadron is officially named the 335th Medium Bombardment Squadron. Unofficially, it's known as the "Death's Head Brigade".
- Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: In High Crystal, Steve Austin tries to find a mysterious crystal. It's a power source left on Earth by space aliens.
- Tap on the Head: Averted in the Cyborg novels. Considerably more violent than the TV series they inspired, due to Steve Austin's bionic arm being described as a bludgeon, and strong hits to the head or chops to the neck are instantly fatal to the recipient.
- Temple of Doom: In High Crystal, the eponymous crystal is found in an ancient temple which is protected by numerous traps. Subverted in that the temple also contains numerous warnings about the traps - the builders only meant to trap and kill people who didn't heed the warnings.
- That's No Moon: In High Crystal, the Temple of Doom which houses the crystal is literally the size of a mountain - in fact, everyone thought it was a mountain until Austin's expedition gets a closeup look and finds that the "mountain" is made of blocks of cut stone.
- Underwater City: In Aquarius Mission, a large submarine sent to investigate some weird things in the Aleutian Trench off Alaska stumbles on a submerged city at the bottom of the trench, inhabited by merfolk and their specially bred beasts of burden.
- We Can Rebuild Him: In the "Cyborg" series, Steve Austin is an astronaut and US Air Force test pilot rebuilt with cybernetic parts after a horrific crash in an experimental aircraft.
- Worthy Opponent: In The Last Dogfight, Mitch Ross and Shigura Tanimoto see each other this way.
- Zeroth Law Rebellion: In The God Machine, the US races to develop the first true AI... as it turns out, with secret directives to find a winning solution to the "game" of the Cold War. By an unfortunate accident, the one programmer with the authority and experience to distrust his newborn creation is laid up just as the computer gets to observe an epileptic seizure and learns that there really is a way to cause rational collective behavior in an irrational individualistic species... remove irrationality, democracy and free will.
