“We can rebuild him”: Rediscovering Cyborg by Martin Caidin After a Lifetime with The Six Million Dollar Man
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man.”
If you were a kid growing up in the 70s or 80s, those words likely echo in your memory, accompanied by the whirring sound of a slow-motion jump, the intense zoom of a bionic eye, and the iconic crash that opens each episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. Like many, I first met Steve Austin not in a book, but through the glowing television screen — a hero with superhuman strength, robotic limbs, and a focused stare that could zoom in like a hawk’s. I watched the companion show, The Bionic Woman, with the same reverence. And yes, I had the action figure — Steve in his red astronaut suit, and that unforgettable detail: the bionic eye, which was actually a tiny plastic lens embedded in the back of the figure’s head. You’d hold it up to the light and pretend to see like Steve could. I even had a boardgame where you had to clear four different missions – underwater, in space, at a nuclear facility and supporting international enforcement agencies.
Back then, I was mesmerised. The idea that a person could be saved — even improved — with robotics (or cybernetics!) was thrilling, and maybe a little terrifying. It sparked something in my young imagination that has never quite gone away. Over the years, I’ve noticed traces of that same fascination surface elsewhere — in Luke Skywalker’s robotic hand in The Empire Strikes Back, in the cold logic of the Borg in Star Trek, in the ethical questions surrounding cyborgs in science fiction from Ghost in the Shell to RoboCop. But for me, it all started with Steve Austin.
It wasn’t until recently, reflecting on the impact of the show, that I realised I had never actually read the book that started it all. Cyborg, by Martin Caidin, was published in 1972 — a full year before the television pilot aired. So I tracked down a copy, settled in, and began the journey not with slow-motion heroics or swelling theme music, but with prose. And what a ride it turned out to be.
Reading Cyborg in 2025: Of Crashes and Cold Wars
Let me start by saying this: Cyborg is unmistakably a book of its time. The Cold War casts a long shadow across its pages, and some of the social attitudes — particularly around women — are not exactly what you’d call progressive. There’s a datedness to it that, while occasionally jarring, also serves as a time capsule, reminding you just how far we’ve come, and how ideas of progress — technological or societal — were once framed.
What surprised me most was the pace. The book opens with the now-familiar accident scene — a test pilot’s craft malfunctions during a flight and crashes in a fiery catastrophe. But unlike the TV show, which condenses this into a few seconds of footage with dramatic narration, Cyborg devotes nearly an entire chapter to the crash. Caidin stretches time to sub-second detail. You feel the lurch of the failing engines, the thrum of fear in Austin’s chest, the violent chaos of physics taking over. It’s cinematic in its own way, not through fast pacing, but through intense focus. It’s a technique that may feel unusual to today’s reader, but it works. For that chapter, I was there — in the cockpit, in the confusion, in the horror.
That’s where Caidin’s background in aviation journalism shows. The technical detail is loving, precise, and at times overwhelming — but never dry. He treats the machinery with reverence, and the man inside it with a mix of admiration and pity. Austin’s injuries are catastrophic. His survival is a question of both luck and ambition — and of vision. That’s where the true heart of the book lies: in the rebuilding. Furthermore, later in the book, when Steve attempts to take his own life, it brings focus the the humanity of it all.
Reading Cyborg, I was struck by how it straddles the line between hard science fiction and something closer to a thriller. The concept of rebuilding a human being with advanced robotics is explored not just as a fantasy, but as a series of technical, ethical, and psychological challenges. Caidin doesn’t just wave a wand and turn Steve into a superhero — he describes the surgeries, the integration of metal and flesh, the neural interfaces. There’s even discussion of the cost — yes, six million dollars — and how that figure becomes both a literal and symbolic investment in a man’s future. It also takes its time with the process; while in the TV series the opening credits provide the background of Steve’s rebuild, the book takes into account the time that “upgrades” take, but also considers the psychological process that Steve–the human–needs to undergo to get through the other side.
The bionics in the book are less glamorous than in the show, but perhaps more interesting. They don’t always work. They malfunction. Steve suffers. There’s a real human beneath the enhancements, and he doesn’t always welcome the changes. That’s a dimension that the show sometimes touched on, but which the book lingers over in much more detail. I was disappointed that the bionic eye in the book does not match the description in the TV series where it is more like a digital camera. In the book, true to the advances at the time, the bionic eye is actually a microfilm camera. Not nearly as impressive, but as I mentioned above, definitely of its time
And then there are the missions.
Missions and Memories: Where Book and Show Diverge
Without spoiling too much, Cyborg includes two main missions once Steve has been rebuilt and “repurposed” as an operative for a shadowy government agency. The missions themselves — one involving espionage in the Middle East, another with a nuclear twist — are serviceable but not particularly memorable. They feel more like Cold War adventure filler than true tests of character. Where the book soars in its reconstruction and psychological reflection, it stumbles a bit when it tries to become a standard spy thriller.
I found myself missing the structure and pacing of the television episodes — the ones I remember, anyway. In those, Steve often acted as a cross between secret agent and superhero. He was charming, capable, and heroic in a way that felt larger than life. Maybe it’s nostalgia speaking, but I remember being more captivated by the TV show’s stories — more variety, more moral ambiguity, more style.
Then again, it’s been years since I watched an episode. Perhaps I owe it to myself to revisit the show and see how it holds up. With streaming services bringing these classics back, there’s never been a better time to do a rewatch.
Of Borgs and Bionics: A Lifelong Fascination
Reading Cyborg reminded me how formative these ideas were to me as a child — and how enduring they’ve become. The notion of merging man and machine is no longer just science fiction. From cochlear implants to robotic prosthetics to brain-computer interfaces, the world of bionics is real and accelerating. We live in a time when some are experimenting with neural links, and there is funding for mechanical limbs that respond to thought, and when artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to augment human capability.
In some ways, Steve Austin was the prototype not just for a fictional idea, but for a whole future. And while Cyborg may have been written with Cold War anxieties in mind, its questions about identity, enhancement, and humanity feel more relevant than ever.
We still ask: What happens when we rebuild a person? When do they stop being human? What parts of us are essential — and which can be upgraded? The book doesn’t answer those questions definitively, but it opens the door to them in a way that’s thoughtful and surprisingly modern.
If you grew up with The Six Million Dollar Man or The Bionic Woman, reading Cyborg is like discovering the original blueprint for something you only ever saw in action. It’s more technical, slower-paced, and occasionally problematic in its outdated social views. But it’s also rich with imagination, detailed in its descriptions, and unafraid to ask big questions.
It’s not perfect. But it doesn’t have to be.
It gave us Steve Austin. It gave us the idea that broken things can be made not just whole, but better. And it planted seeds that continue to grow in our culture, our technology, and our science fiction.
So yes, I recommend the book — with the caveat that it’s a product of its time. And if you enjoy it, you’ll be pleased to know that Caidin wrote several sequels, including Operation Nuke, High Crystal, and Cyborg IV. I may just explore those next.
In the meantime, I’m off to find reruns of The Six Million Dollar Man. I want to hear that theme again. I want to see Steve’s slow-motion jump and with that characteristic “bionic” sound. I want to peer through that bionic eye one more time — and remember a time when the future was red jumpsuits, whirring sounds, and the simple belief that science could save a life.
We did have the technology.
And perhaps, in some ways, we still do.
Have you read Cyborg or rewatched The Six Million Dollar Man lately? What are your memories of the show? Feel free to share — I’d love to hear how others connected with the bionic dream.