Martin Caidin's Cyborg as Proto-Techno-Thriller

Researching the military techno-thriller for my book on the subject a few years ago, specifically looking for the linkages between those old invasion stories of the pre-World War I era and the age of Tom Clancy, I found plenty of connecting threads--works across various genres that retained some of the old elements of the invasion story that, developed by later writers, led back to it. Thus by the early 1970s we were starting to get a good many books that look fairly close to the '80s-era thrillers of this type, with many of the elements, but arguably not quite all the way there, with a good example Martin Caidin's Cyborg--the novel on which Kenneth Johnson based The Six Million Dollar Man series.

Cyborg's military-espionage, technological and geopolitical themes, and its action-adventure-oriented and action-packed treatment of them, not least in its technically detailed flying sequences, are certainly consistent with the military techno-thriller's character. Still, there are reasons for thinking of the book as less techno-thriller than proto-techno-thriller. After all, if the flying scenes would do a later techno-thriller credit the real star of the show technologically is Austin's bionics, not a major theme of that form, not least because they are more than usually futuristic for the genre--science fiction-al, in a way that subsequent Steve Austin adventures were. Thus did the third book in the Cyborg series offer crypto-history involving "ancient astronauts," the fourth an artificially intelligent computer. such details Cyborg and its sequels look a lot more Clive Cussler than Tom Clancy, even if representative of the trend leading to the latter.