Book Review: 'Prison Ship' by Martin Caidin
Martin Caidin (1927 – 1997) was a prolific author of nonfiction books (mainly about military aviation) and fiction (mainly SF, thrillers, and aviation-related topics). Growing up in the 60s and 70s I read several of his military history books, as well as his novel ‘Cyborg’, which became the basis for the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man. Caidin’s fiction was serviceable, if not considered by the sci-fi literati to be noteworthy (he never was invited to contribute to the major anthologies of the 60s and 70s). But his books sold well enough for him to release them on a continuous basis from the late 50s to the mid 90s.
‘Prison Ship’ (596 pp.) is a thick chunk of a paperback, and features cover art by David Mattingly. It was published by Tor Books in April 1989.
This novel is a very clear effort by Caidin to be provocative, to shock bourgeoisie sensibilities, to offend blacks, Hispanics, Moslems, Hindus, and most of all, people who liked their aliens lovable and cuddly, like ‘E.T.’ and the Ewoks.
It’s difficult to see what Caidin hoped to gain career-wise by assembling a 596-page SF ‘splatterpunk’ novel, other than the ability to direct an upraised literary middle finger to the SF publishing community. Or perhaps he simply wanted to show just how ‘macho’ a writer he could be.
‘Prison Ship’ features three main characters; two human, and one alien. The main human character is Jake Marden, a sort of secular Jewish version of Doc Savage, but with a fondness for committing crimes, not deterring them. The other character is a Bad Azz Mofo black man named Jube Bailey. Jake and Jube meet up in Old Millford Prison, a state penitentiary located in Florida. Jake and Jube, by virtue of their physical size, ferociousness, and intelligence, take command of the prison and turn it into their own unique criminal enterprise.
The third character is an alien named Arbok; once a hotshot interstellar pilot, Arbok has been convicted of murder and is sentenced, along with five other aliens, to certain death as a slave laborer on a prison planet in a galaxy far, far away. Arbok leads an insurrection aboard the Frarsk, the prison ship of the book’s title, and commandeers the vessel to a distant galaxy and one of its few habitable planets: Earth.
Arbok and Jake establish a quasi-telepathic link and soon the Frarsk touches down on the grounds of Old Millford. What happens when six homicidal aliens team up with a small army of homicidal earthmen ? Nothing good, that’s clear. There will be VERY little singing of ‘Kumbaya’ around the fire and heartfelt messages about Peace, Love, and Multicultural Understanding. There WILL be plenty of violence and atrocities.
As an action novel, ‘Prison Ship’ starts off with plenty of velocity; the first 38 pages contain more mayhem and intrigue than entire novels by other thriller writers. But after that, the book begins to lose steam. It’s too long by at least 200 pages (if not more) and suffers from uneven pacing, too many filler passages, utterly contrived plotting, and pulp-worthy dialogue. I finished the book wondering if the Baen editor assigned to handle it actually did anything more than simply sign off on the publishing contract.
‘Prison Ship’’s splatterpunk content is liberal. These semi-pornographic passages are offset by star / asterisk symbols so that squeamish readers can skip them. In my mind these passages could have been deleted without harming the novel all that much. But again, Caidin seems to have been adamant about being Transgressive, so the splatterpunk stuff crops up at regular intervals.
One section towards the book’s end, supposedly representing a ‘shock’ revelation about the aliens, is so contrived, and so clumsily enthusiastic about piling on the gore, that it’s hard to come away from ‘Prison Ship’ with any attitude other than one that recognizes that Caidin knew he was putting out some major schlock.
If you’re a fan of splatterpunk, and you can tolerate a meandering, plodding narrative if it delivers plenty of sarcastic, gruesome humor, then ‘Prison Ship’ will be your cup of tea.
If you’re expecting a carefully crafted novel that uses SF tropes and graphic violence to say something unpleasant (but true) about the Human Condition (like Norman Spinrad does in ‘The Men in the Jungle’), I don’t think 'Prison Ship' will appeal to you.
1 comment:
That guy had a really strange career. Early on he wrote serious novels like "Marooned" which was made into a A-list movie. But around 1975 he started thinking he was telepathic. Later on he wrote crazy, slapdash novels like the one you reviewed.
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