Now here's an author who's long overdue at POTG, Mr. Martin Caidin! A glance at his author blurb will be enough to elucidate, but let's go on anyway: Caidin was a naval/aviation buff and prolific author of subjects fiction and nonfiction, including coauthoring Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai's autobiography and penning multiple tie-in novels including the source novel for the hit TV show The Six Million Dollar Man and the novelization of the '80s time travel sci-fi actioner The Final Countdown. Other works integrated UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle, making Caidin the perfect author for this blog! It just so happens that his debut here is a slightly sideways apocalyptic techno thriller, is all.
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| Marty! Lookin' sharp bud! |
Once again, mortal man has been mucking about with powers beyond his ken. This time it's a project for fusion power, which has spiraled out of control and spawned a voracious black hole smack dab in the foothills of picturesque Cumberland County, Tennessee. If somebody doesn't do something fast this hungry little bastard is gonna gobble up the entire planet!
Caidin gets off on the wrong foot with a cutesy action opening that dredges up memories of yesterday's limp-dicked wannabe "action" novel The Big One, as some super secret special forces guys get absolutely owned by scientist/warrior Dr. Owen Kimberly while attempting to shanghai him as a trouble shooter for Project Star Bright. This opener could have been scrapped without losing anything of value. It's one of several missteps along the way that make me wonder if Star Bright was some kind of fix-up novel - there's no background info really available on the web but the herky jerk pacing coupled with some archaic science fiction prose style leads me down that path. Neutron stars and black holes were cutting edge maybe a decade before this novel's publication date which is another odd note. Anyways, moving on to the actual story ...
It's alright. There are some truly beautiful moments of "hard SF" poetry, descriptions of powers and forces beyond anything we could imagine if they weren't staring us in the face, but there's also a lot of clunky dialogue and broad characterizations to sit through getting there. Once shit truly hits the fan we're home free to a crackerjack finale. At his best, Caidin achieves some sublime levels of existential terror. To go back to The Big One again, in Star Bright we're treated to thousands of casualties off screen, as end times cultists and martial law rack up the body count. Where in The Big One we felt cheated by the glib mentions of mega-death, here the effect is to heighten the tension as our scientist characters are locked off from the rest of the world, truly alone and solely responsible for the fate of the planet.
A former owner made a note of Sodium Penethol (sic) on the inside frontis, possibly referencing another book they were reading. For a modest but sometimes effective little apocalypse, Caidin's Star Bright earns two swirling black holes out of four:
Bantam Books, 1980
Cardin. Your new muse peut etre?
ReplyDeleteYes I hope so!
DeleteMartin Caidin’s debut novel was THE LONG NIGHT which was published in 1956. His second novel was MAROONED, which hit the bookshelves in 1964 and made as a feature film in 1969. Caidin revised his novel and the updated version was published in 1969. He invented the techno thriller genre, not Tom Clancy.
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