Cyborg is the title of a
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
/
secret agentSecret Agent is a British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film starred John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young...
novel by
Martin CaidinMartin Caidin was an American author and an authority on aeronautics and aviation.Caidin wrote more than 50 books, including Samurai!, Black Thursday, Thunderbolt!, Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38, Zero!, The Ragged, Rugged Warriors, A Torch to the Enemy and many other works of military history...
which was first published in 1972. The novel also included elements of
speculative fictionSpeculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...
, and was adapted as the television series
The Six Million Dollar ManThe Six Million Dollar Man is an American television series about a former astronaut with bionic implants working for the OSI...
and also inspired its spin-off,
The Bionic WomanThe Bionic Woman is an American television series starring Lindsay Wagner that aired for three seasons between 1976 and 1978 as a spin off from The Six Million Dollar Man. Wagner stars as tennis pro Jaime Sommers who is nearly killed in a skydiving accident. Sommers' life is saved by Oscar Goldman ...
.
Plot summary
Cyborg is the story of an astronaut-turned-test pilot,
Steve AustinSteve Austin is a fictional character created by Martin Caidin for his 1972 novel, Cyborg, who later became a 1970s television icon as portrayed by Lee Majors in the 1974-1978 series The Six Million Dollar Man.-Background:...
, who experiences a catastrophic crash during a flight, leaving him with all but one limb destroyed, blind in one eye, and with other major injuries.
At the same time, a secret branch of the American government, the Office of Strategic Operations (OSO) has taken an interest in the work of Dr. Rudy Wells in the field of
bionicsBionics is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.The word bionic was coined by Jack E...
- the replacement of human body parts with mechanical prosthetics that (in the context of this novel) are more powerful than the original limbs. Wells also happens to be a close friend of Austin's, so when OSO chief
Oscar GoldmanOscar Goldman is a fictional character created by Martin Caidin and introduced in his 1972 novel Cyborg. In the 1970s, he was portrayed by Richard Anderson in both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman television series which were based upon Cyborg...
"invites" (or rather, orders) Wells to rebuild Austin with bionics limbs, Wells agrees.
(Note: in Caidin's writings, he uses the form "bionics" in all references treating it as both noun (singular) and adjective, since "-ics" is the Greek suffix meaning science, study or practice, as in "physics"; this was changed for the subsequent television series to the more adjectival-sounding form "bionic", e.g. "bionic limbs" rather than Caidin's "bionics limbs".)
Steve Austin is outfitted with two new legs capable of propelling him at great speed, and a bionics left arm that while closely resembling a human arm, is in fact a deadly bludgeon and battering ram. His left eye is replaced with a false, removable eye that is used (in this first novel) to house a miniature camera. Other physical alterations include the installation of a steel skull plate to replace bone smashed by the crash, a poison dart gun in one of the fingers of the bionics arm, and a radio transmitter built into a rib. This mixture of man and machine is known as a
cyborgA cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. D. S...
, from which the novel gets its title.
The first half of the novel details Austin's operation and both his reaction to his original injuries—he attempts to commit suicide—and his initially resentful reaction to being rebuilt with bionics. The operation comes with a hefty price tag, and Austin is committed to working for the OSO as a reluctant agent. He is teamed with a female operative and sent to the Middle East as a new weapon against extremism.
Steve Austin series
Caidin's book was written as the first of a series, and over the next few years he would write three more books that were, for the most part, independent of the continuity of the television series (upon which additional novels were written by other authors):
- Operation Nuke
Operation Nuke is the title of the second book in the Cyborg series of science fiction/secret agent novels by Martin Caidin which was first published in 1973, just prior to Cyborg being adapted as the television series The Six Million Dollar Man...
(1973)
- High Crystal
High Crystal is a science fiction/secret agent novel by Martin Caidin that was first published in 1974. It was the second sequel to Caidin's 1972 work Cyborg, which in turn was the basis for the television series The Six Million Dollar Man...
(1974)
- Cyborg IV
Cyborg IV is a science fiction/secret agent novel by Martin Caidin that was first published in 1975. It was the fourth and final book in a series of novels Caidin began in 1972 with Cyborg, profiling the adventures of astronaut Steve Austin, who becomes a spy for the American government after an...
(1975)
For a list of episode novelizations, see the article on
The Six Million Dollar ManThe Six Million Dollar Man is an American television series about a former astronaut with bionic implants working for the OSI...
.
Television
In 1973,
Cyborg was adapted as a 90-minute made-for-TV movie titled
The Six Million Dollar Man. The film begins with a computerized text scroll explaining the term "cyborg" and since the word "CYBORG" is the first word seen on screen, some sources, including the ABC network's own promotions for the telefilm and later
DiscovisionDiscoVision is the name of several things related to the video laserdisc format. It was the original name of the "Reflective Optical Videodisc System" format later known as LaserVision or LaserDisc....
home video release, give the full title as
Cyborg: The Six Million Dollar Man.
The film starred
Lee MajorsLee Majors is an American television, film and voice actor, best known for his starring role as Colonel Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man and as Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy ....
as Austin and
Martin BalsamMartin Henry Balsam was an American actor. He is known for his Oscar-winning role as "Arnold Burns" in A Thousand Clowns and his role as "Detective Milton Arbogast" in Psycho.- Early life :...
as Rudy Wells. For reasons unknown, it was decided to change the name of the OSO chief to Oliver Spencer (played by
Darren McGavinDarren McGavin was an American actor best known for playing the title role in the television horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker and his portrayal in the film A Christmas Story of the grumpy father given to bursts of profanity that he never realizes his son overhears...
). Real-life footage of a test plane crash was incorporated into the film to depict Austin's accident.
The first half of the film follows
Cyborg fairly closely, including Austin's initial suicide attempt and Wells' reluctance to operate on his friend. The second half of the telefilm differs from the novel, with Austin dropped into a remote part of
Saudi ArabiaThe Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...
on a solo mission and ordered to rescue a prisoner from a group of extremists, a mission later revealed to be a test of Austin's abilities.
The film was a ratings hit. A second film,
Wine, Women and War was commissioned, but this was not based upon a Caidin work. For this second film, Oscar Goldman was reinstated (with
Richard AndersonRichard Norman Anderson is an American actor in film and television, known to TV audiences as Steve Austin's and Jaime Sommers' boss, Oscar Goldman, in both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman TV series and their three subsequent TV movies: The Return of the Six-Million-Dollar Man...
playing the role), but the agency was renamed the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI).
Alan OppenheimerAlan Oppenheimer is an American character actor and voice actor. He has performed numerous roles on live-action television since the 1960s, and has had an active career doing voice work in cartoons since the 1970s.-Early life:...
replaced Martin Balsam as Dr. Wells. A third TV movie,
Solid Gold Kidnapping followed, after which
The Six Million Dollar Man was launched as a weekly TV series in 1974, running until 1978; five seasons in total. The original pilot film was re-edited with new footage to make it a "flashback episode" and syndicated as the two-part "The Moon and the Desert". Author Martin Caidin, according to
The Bionic Book by Herbie Pilato, served as an uncredited consultant on the series throughout its run and ultimately made a cameo appearance in one of its final-season episodes; in addition, author
Jay BarbreeJay Barbree is a correspondent for NBC News, focusing on space travel. Barbree is the only journalist to have covered every manned space mission in the United States, beginning with the first American in space, Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 in 1961, continuing through to the last mission of the...
, who collaborated with Caidin on a number of non-fiction book projects and also wrote a novel based upon the series.
In 1976, a spin-off,
The Bionic WomanThe Bionic Woman is an American television series starring Lindsay Wagner that aired for three seasons between 1976 and 1978 as a spin off from The Six Million Dollar Man. Wagner stars as tennis pro Jaime Sommers who is nearly killed in a skydiving accident. Sommers' life is saved by Oscar Goldman ...
was launched, running also until 1978, or three seasons. In 1987, 1989 and 1994 three made-for-TV films reunited the casts of both series. Due to his licensing agreement with
Universal StudiosUniversal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
, Caidin received credit on all these productions, even though
The Bionic Woman did not originate in his books.
The Bionic Woman was remade in 2007 as
Bionic WomanBionic Woman is an American science fiction television drama created by David Eick, under NBC Universal Television Group, GEP Productions and David Eick Productions that aired in 2007...
, although few elements from the 1976-78 series were retained; elements from
Cyborg, however, were incorporated, such the imagined Jaime Sommers possessing a bionic eye - a feature invented by Caidin for Austin - and organizational similarlities between the OSO of Caidin's novel and the telefilm, and the Berkut Group organization featured in the remake. Only nine episodes of the remake were produced.
Changes for television
A number of changes to Austin's bionic abilities and his demeanor were made as Caidin's dark-in-tone original novel and its concepts were adapted.
In order to increase the science-fiction appeal, Austin's bionics were made more powerful, and he had abilities his literary counterpart lacked. Most notably, the first telefilm revealed that Austin's replacement bionic eye had a telescopic feature (later expanded to include nightvision), whereas Caidin originally had Austin's eye be little more than a mini-camera (and the character was still blind in it). Although his bionic eye is shown pre-implantation and Austin is later shown using both of his eyes for normal vision, the telefilm otherwise omits any demonstration of the eye's special abilities. (The comic book adaptation of
The Six Million Dollar Man added even more functions to the eye; in the first issue Austin shoots a laser out of the eye, while in a later issue its telescopic function is so advanced he is able to see a man standing on a streetcorner from dozens of miles away.)
Austin was made to be less cold-blooded in the TV series. In the novel (and those that followed), Caidin depicts Austin as somewhat of a cold-blooded killer who actually commits an act of murder during his second mission (he kills a truck driver in order to prevent the man from identifying Austin to the enemy). The TV version, however, is shown stating outright that he has no desire to kill people (although he still does, on occasion), and tools such as the poison dart gun in the bionic arm were dropped. Also, since actor Majors was right-handed, it was decided that Austin's bionic arm would be his right, not his left as depicted in the novels. In Caidin's novel, the bionics arm was essentially a bludgeon and battering ram (Austin is frequently described crushing skulls with it during fight sequences); in the televised version the arm is more sophisticated and Austin is shown bending bars and throwing objects great distances with it.
In the novel, Austin is described as having a military and astronaut background. In the telefilm adaptation, he is explicitly described as a civilian test pilot (although also a former astronaut). For the television series, Austin's background was changed to match that of the books, and he was given the rank of US Air Force Colonel.
Other novels
Despite the minor and major changes made to the character for television, when authors such as Mike Jahn and Evan Richards were commissioned to write novelizations based upon
Six Million Dollar Man episodes, they chose to follow Caidin's original model of the character, which on at least one occasion (the adaptation of "Love Song for Tanya" contained within Jahn's book,
International Incidents) led to the ending of an episode being changed (in the episode, the villain is apprehended by Austin and arrested; in the book, Austin simply fires his poison dart gun at him and kills him).
Comic books
While
The Six Million Dollar Man spawned its own comic book adaptation (which see the TV series' article for details), the original novel - as well as the TV series - is presently receiving a new adaptation for the comic medium.
The Bionic Man, published by Dynamite, began a serialized run in August 2011, and is based upon a unproduced screenplay by
Kevin SmithKevin Patrick Smith is an American screenwriter, actor, film producer, and director, as well as a popular comic book writer, author, comedian/raconteur, and internet radio personality best recognized by viewers as Silent Bob...
.
Other references
In the 1990s, Caidin wrote the novel
Buck Rogers: A Life in the FutureBuck Rogers: A Life in the Future is the title of a science fiction novel by Martin Caidin published in 1995.The novel is a reimagining of Buck Rogers, a pulp fiction character created in the 1920s by Philip Francis Nowlan and later popularized in a long-running comic strip and in films and...
based upon the
Buck RogersAnthony Rogers is a fictional character that first appeared in Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in the March 1929 issue....
comic strip of the 1930s. In this book, Caidin pays tribute to
Cyborg by having Buck Rogers receive bionics transplants following his 500-year coma, including several direct references to Steve Austin himself.
Cyborg was not Caidin's first dalliance with bionics, as the concept is also discussed in his 1968 novel,
The God MachineThe God Machine is a science fiction written by Martin Caidin and first published in 1968. Set in the near future, the novel tells the story of a top secret cybernetic technician Steve Rand, one of the brains behind Project 79, a top-secret US government project dedicated to creating artificial...
. Caidin also revisited the concept in his 1982 novel
Manfac, ISBN 0671654098, ISBN 978-0671654092, which even included dialog that derisively referred to the
Six Million Dollar Man series.