Conference noted::sf

           <<< Note 941.0 by AYOV27::RPAGE "It's Green to be mean" >>>
                -< Martin Caidin's Prison Ship-mindless sewage >-

>    I have had the misfortune to encounter this book and am driven to
>    wonder if the author(?) usually writes this sort of dross. 
    


I don't know if its the same "Martin Caidin" but a "Martin Caidin"
wrote the "Six Million Dollar Man" books (among others)

    If this is the book I remember glancing at in a store, it's pretty raw.
    There was a "hard-bitten" scene in a prison, then a line of asterisks
    and a note that what followed might be too violent for many readers,
    then what I can best describe as "violence-porn", involving the
    detailed description of the mutilation of someone's private parts.
    
    De gustibus non disputandem est.
    
    		-John Bishop

  Gee, that's a shame.  Caidin wrote at least one decent WWII novel (The 
  Last Dogfight) and a couple of good nonfiction books (the one I recall
  is "Samurai" which was the story of the greatest Japanese figher ace, 
  Saburo Sakai).

  I've tried a couple of his SF attempts (including "Marooned") and was
  less than impressed.  Thanks for the warning on this one, though!

  JP

    
    Another agreement here. I too read "Prison Ship" some time back and it
    was terrible. The premis of the story was great - a ship of escaped
    e.t.'s, each from a different planet and with a different story plus
    some strange abilities arrives on Earth. Problem is, they link up with
    a group of brilliant, charasmatic, tough, honorable human inmates who
    they've 'mind-linked' with while traversing this part of the galaxy.
    
    Brilliant, charasmatic, honorable inmates? That's part of the problem
    with the book. I can accept almost anything about a being from another
    planet, but when human characters are written so unrealistically I
    balk. The biggest problem I had with the book was that so many pages
    were devoted to telling the history of several characters, only to have
    them leave, die, or be a non-factor in the story itself. It was
    irritating.
    

    The only thing I've ever read by Caidin which caught my interest was
    "The God Machine".  But I was thirteen at the time.
    
    I wonder if it really was a good book?
    
    Max
    

I remember a looong time ago seeing the movie version of "Marooned", then seeing
it on TV some years later. It is incredibly boring. I also read "Cyborg," on 
which the $6M Man was based, back in 8th grade (I thought the TV movie was 
great, mechanical legs and eye and all), and found it equally boring. It was 
also very long, double shame. I have avoided Caidin's work since then.

    	MAROONED may have seemed boring to you (I found it interesting), 
    but it gets points in my book for daring to be scientifically realis-
    tic in terms of orbital physics, spacecraft designs, etc.
    
    	Larry
                                                       

    Larry,
    
    did you find Marooned scientifically realistic when they were
    essentially breathing in vacuum?  (as I remember, I last saw this a
    number of years ago, sometime after the spacewalk where the crewman
    dies, one of the surviving astronauts takes off his helmet and is
    'breathing' in the cabin that had not been repreasurrized.)
    
    Was it realistic (I know not scientifically realistic) that the Russian
    could match air hoses with the American?
    
    Marooned MAY have had some realism in its orbital mechanics, but it was
    far from a realistic film.
    
    Tony

    	Okay, it's Clarification Time:  No, not every part of MAROONED
    was "realistic", but compared to most Hollywood SF science, it was 
    way ahead of the pack, thus my credit to the film.
    
	Larry
    

    Hey, I be charitable about blaming the producers of a film of one of
    Caidin's novels for techncial inaccuracies.  He's not so blameless
    himself.  In one of his potboilers ("Escape from Earth"?) he has the
    passengers of a rocket violently thrown forward when the engines
    cut off...  (Obviously, even in a vacuum, the cessation of acceleration
    results in substantial deceleration).
    
    len.
    

    
    He also wrote (many years ago) a novel called "The Aquarius Mission"
    which was sort of a cross between the old Irwin Allen T.V. show "Voyage
    to the Bottom of the Sea", the movies "The Abyss" and "Leviathan", and
    the Frank Herbet novel about the submarine tanker caught in a war in
    the Arctic (can't remember the title).
    
    Of the handful of things of his I've read - I'd say this was the best.
    
    David