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Prison Ship
Inhabitants of the earth have learned to live in peaceful harmony, but a masterplan to conquer them is hatched by ruthless, depraved convicts and a band of human desperados--whose cruelty knows no bounds
- GenresScience FictionFiction
596 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 1, 1989
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67 people want to read
About the author
Martin Caidin
193 books81 followersMartin Caidin was a prolific and controversial writer. Most of his work centered around the adventures of pilots and astronauts. A number of his books were notable for their reasonable, realistic predictions of then-futuristic technology.
Caidin's body of work was prolific and varied, ranging from additional speculative/SF novels such as Marooned, which was made into an acclaimed film and considered a harbinger of the Apollo 13 accident, to a novel based upon the character Indiana Jones. He also wrote many non-fiction books about science, aviation and warfare.
Caidin began writing fiction in 1957. In his career he authored more than 50 fiction and nonfiction books as well as more than 1,000 magazine articles. His best-known novel is Cyborg, which was the basis for "The Six Million Dollar Man" franchise. He also wrote numerous works of military history, especially concerning aviation.
In addition to his writing Caidin was a pilot and active in the restoration and flying of older planes.
Caidin's body of work was prolific and varied, ranging from additional speculative/SF novels such as Marooned, which was made into an acclaimed film and considered a harbinger of the Apollo 13 accident, to a novel based upon the character Indiana Jones. He also wrote many non-fiction books about science, aviation and warfare.
Caidin began writing fiction in 1957. In his career he authored more than 50 fiction and nonfiction books as well as more than 1,000 magazine articles. His best-known novel is Cyborg, which was the basis for "The Six Million Dollar Man" franchise. He also wrote numerous works of military history, especially concerning aviation.
In addition to his writing Caidin was a pilot and active in the restoration and flying of older planes.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 13, 2025
Martin Caidin wrote a few pretty good books after the late 1980s and several that I liked very much prior to that time (which is why I continued reading him), but Baen published several that were not my cup of tea at all 1985 -1989. This one appeared in April of 1989 and contains scenes of graphic violence and torture along with non-stop extreme misogyny and racism and profanity and unpleasantness. It's about a group of aliens who are convicted felons teaming up with a group of the worst dregs of criminal humanity to use the alien technology to make Earth miserable. Such extreme depictions may have a place in literature, but this one drags on for six-hundred pages of small print with no redeeming social value that I could find other than pointing out that evil is evil. Baen even printed a disclaimer/warning on the first page inside the cover and offset some of the scenes throughout the text that they knew were most objectionable with star-breaks between sections. It does tell a story and it's very descriptive and seems to be just as Caidin wanted the story to be told, but it's not an easy read.
February 22, 2018
Well, this was a roller coaster ride. Sorta. I mean, a roller coaster has to go up and not just down. This was more like a log flume. Into a deep well. At the bottom of which was another well. I started out thinking this was going to be a solid 4-star book with a real shot at a fifth star, and then the sheer misanthropy started hitting me, and finally the excruciatingly bad "romance". And six-hundred pages.
The premise is engaging enough. You've got some prison bad-asses on earth who come up with a scheme to take over the prison they're in—I mean in a sneaky sort of way, where they're running all kinds of rackets from inside the walls while still keeping up appearances that it's actually a legitimate prison—while light-years away a prison ship full of aliens come up with a plan to take over their ship and escape to someplace remote and safe (earth, of course).
Around page 140 or so, I began thinking to myself, "This is what the kids today call 'edgelord'." The earth characters in the book are ridiculously badass, speaking almost entirely in racial epithets and handling every problem with murder (or threatened murder). Of course, they have to be hyper-competent at nearly everything: combat (of course), flight, computers, biology, you name it. Heinlein was fond of this sort of ubermensch.
And much like Heinlein, it's not long before you realize that all the characters talk alike, and all of them exactly like the author—whom they're all stand-ins for—with all pretty much the same emotional reactions (plus a little window dressing for the "female" characters, which I'll get to in a moment). But I was okay with this, at first. I'm going to try to recreate my thoughts and feelings as I went along.
First part. OK, this is going to be a fun, violent, space opera/type adventure where some really nasty earth characters get mixed up with some nasty alien characters.
Huh. All the aliens seem like decent beings who have essentially been framed or set up by the system. The two human protagonists are literal mass murderers who rather indifferently kill lots of innocents. All right, let's roll with it.
OK, the author likes to spend a lot of time with lengthy pseudo-science explanations of nonsense.
All right, the aliens get to earth but they've learned about us and are unable to withstand our mighty nuclear weapons. Oh, okay, at least the author is making a nod toward the ridiculousness of that. He's saying earth nukes are more powerful than the forces a ship in space traveling at FTL speeds would encounter.
OK, that's the story he wants to tell, fine. Otherwise maybe we got no story.
Now it looks like our prisoners and our aliens are going to team up. That could be interesting. They can apparently turn the prison into a super-secret alien base, without detection, all because of their superior competence and management skills.
Their management skills consist of: Killing anyone who looks cross-eyed at them. At one point, one of the characters scoffs at the notion that the best loyalty is bought with money. He doesn't say what it is best bought with, but I'm guessing he thinks a certain camaraderie and like-mindedness—okay, it's probably murder.
I'm just gonna bring it home again: Our protagonists are capable of outsmarting every government in the world, managing hundreds of the worst criminals in the world, running international trade, and manipulating The System—yet the reason they ended up where they are was because The System done them wrong, and the only solution they could come up with was: mass murder.
Okay, so we're having a big confab and our formerly mild-seeming aliens have turned into little more than animals it seems. Have a brutal rape at a dinner party—in front of every one—which results in a gory death.
Oh, all right. It seems that one of our protagonists preferred solutions to the alien problem is for them all to be dead. One is no longer surprised by this.
Well, except that it's stupid in an unacknowledged way. Up to this point, when I would think "Well, but that doesn't make sense because X," the author would at least say "X doesn't apply because Y." Now, "Y" was often a pretty dubious explanation but I can roll with a lot of that.
Exploiting alien technology is potentially a fine plot device. But it's like Ash taking his Oldsmobile back to the middle-ages (Army of Darkness): You're fine until you need a tire or a spark plug. And if you don't even have Ash, you don't even know you need a tire or a spark plug.
As the story is straining credibility, I'm noticing that there's very little suspense anywhere in this. The Marty Stu nature of leads means they never actually seem to be in danger. It's one thing for them to be cool and collected, and to operate at their best, but it began to seem like the circumstances of the story were themselves timorous about threatening them.
And I realize I keep making excuses for the author: This is the story he wants to tell. But I realize, it's a terrible, terrible story about how awful human beings are. There's a big reveal at the beginning of part V (which I saw coming in part III) which is as hoary a device as exists in science fiction but I had to ask myself why it would have any affect at all on the humans who witness it, who are (as noted) mass murderers, torturers, slavers?
Oh, it's amped up to 11—nonsensically—and it's graphic enough, but it's not much worse than what has already been described, and is accepted by our "heroes". In the midst of this horror, we get the sort of detached survey of the human criminality that—well, "edgelord" comes to mind again. Did I mention that the really graphic passages are marked off with asterisks so the squeamish can skip them? Edgy! Lordy!
Ultimately this behavior will be rationalized, as with all bad behavior in the book, as "humans are worse, tho'."
I figured I was through the worst of it, and from a gore standpoint, that was mostly true. By the end Caidin is just phoning in the nigh-pornographic slaughter of hundreds of people. But there was worse, in the form of the two female characters who react to mass murder with the same stoic reserve as our hardened killers do. A little window dressing, but underneath it all, what's a little mass murder between you and the guy you've had two dates with?
The Japanese girl is just an embarrassment. She's perfect. Because her father wanted a son, I guess.
Then there's a scene of alien technology where, once again, we're reminded (for the third time) of the vast power at the hands of our heroes and how there should really be not the slightest concern for slow-moving earth technology, but we need some kind of close call.
I guess you could say, this one wasn't for me.
The premise is engaging enough. You've got some prison bad-asses on earth who come up with a scheme to take over the prison they're in—I mean in a sneaky sort of way, where they're running all kinds of rackets from inside the walls while still keeping up appearances that it's actually a legitimate prison—while light-years away a prison ship full of aliens come up with a plan to take over their ship and escape to someplace remote and safe (earth, of course).
Around page 140 or so, I began thinking to myself, "This is what the kids today call 'edgelord'." The earth characters in the book are ridiculously badass, speaking almost entirely in racial epithets and handling every problem with murder (or threatened murder). Of course, they have to be hyper-competent at nearly everything: combat (of course), flight, computers, biology, you name it. Heinlein was fond of this sort of ubermensch.
And much like Heinlein, it's not long before you realize that all the characters talk alike, and all of them exactly like the author—whom they're all stand-ins for—with all pretty much the same emotional reactions (plus a little window dressing for the "female" characters, which I'll get to in a moment). But I was okay with this, at first. I'm going to try to recreate my thoughts and feelings as I went along.
First part. OK, this is going to be a fun, violent, space opera/type adventure where some really nasty earth characters get mixed up with some nasty alien characters.
Huh. All the aliens seem like decent beings who have essentially been framed or set up by the system. The two human protagonists are literal mass murderers who rather indifferently kill lots of innocents. All right, let's roll with it.
OK, the author likes to spend a lot of time with lengthy pseudo-science explanations of nonsense.
All right, the aliens get to earth but they've learned about us and are unable to withstand our mighty nuclear weapons. Oh, okay, at least the author is making a nod toward the ridiculousness of that. He's saying earth nukes are more powerful than the forces a ship in space traveling at FTL speeds would encounter.
OK, that's the story he wants to tell, fine. Otherwise maybe we got no story.
Now it looks like our prisoners and our aliens are going to team up. That could be interesting. They can apparently turn the prison into a super-secret alien base, without detection, all because of their superior competence and management skills.
Their management skills consist of: Killing anyone who looks cross-eyed at them. At one point, one of the characters scoffs at the notion that the best loyalty is bought with money. He doesn't say what it is best bought with, but I'm guessing he thinks a certain camaraderie and like-mindedness—okay, it's probably murder.
I'm just gonna bring it home again: Our protagonists are capable of outsmarting every government in the world, managing hundreds of the worst criminals in the world, running international trade, and manipulating The System—yet the reason they ended up where they are was because The System done them wrong, and the only solution they could come up with was: mass murder.
Okay, so we're having a big confab and our formerly mild-seeming aliens have turned into little more than animals it seems. Have a brutal rape at a dinner party—in front of every one—which results in a gory death.
Oh, all right. It seems that one of our protagonists preferred solutions to the alien problem is for them all to be dead. One is no longer surprised by this.
Well, except that it's stupid in an unacknowledged way. Up to this point, when I would think "Well, but that doesn't make sense because X," the author would at least say "X doesn't apply because Y." Now, "Y" was often a pretty dubious explanation but I can roll with a lot of that.
Exploiting alien technology is potentially a fine plot device. But it's like Ash taking his Oldsmobile back to the middle-ages (Army of Darkness): You're fine until you need a tire or a spark plug. And if you don't even have Ash, you don't even know you need a tire or a spark plug.
As the story is straining credibility, I'm noticing that there's very little suspense anywhere in this. The Marty Stu nature of leads means they never actually seem to be in danger. It's one thing for them to be cool and collected, and to operate at their best, but it began to seem like the circumstances of the story were themselves timorous about threatening them.
And I realize I keep making excuses for the author: This is the story he wants to tell. But I realize, it's a terrible, terrible story about how awful human beings are. There's a big reveal at the beginning of part V (which I saw coming in part III) which is as hoary a device as exists in science fiction but I had to ask myself why it would have any affect at all on the humans who witness it, who are (as noted) mass murderers, torturers, slavers?
Oh, it's amped up to 11—nonsensically—and it's graphic enough, but it's not much worse than what has already been described, and is accepted by our "heroes". In the midst of this horror, we get the sort of detached survey of the human criminality that—well, "edgelord" comes to mind again. Did I mention that the really graphic passages are marked off with asterisks so the squeamish can skip them? Edgy! Lordy!
Ultimately this behavior will be rationalized, as with all bad behavior in the book, as "humans are worse, tho'."
I figured I was through the worst of it, and from a gore standpoint, that was mostly true. By the end Caidin is just phoning in the nigh-pornographic slaughter of hundreds of people. But there was worse, in the form of the two female characters who react to mass murder with the same stoic reserve as our hardened killers do. A little window dressing, but underneath it all, what's a little mass murder between you and the guy you've had two dates with?
The Japanese girl is just an embarrassment. She's perfect. Because her father wanted a son, I guess.
Then there's a scene of alien technology where, once again, we're reminded (for the third time) of the vast power at the hands of our heroes and how there should really be not the slightest concern for slow-moving earth technology, but we need some kind of close call.
I guess you could say, this one wasn't for me.
June 12, 2012
Read this in 6th grade. Raunchy is too mild a word. I loved it at the time. lol
January 14, 2011
Gruesome, violent, poorly written scenes make this one nauseating. Wait...maybe I shouldn't call it poorly written if the passages in question were vivid enough to nauseate me. Perhaps that's what Caidin was going for. I never even made it to the end. Skip it; life's too short to waste time on a bad book.
July 7, 2014
Violent but interesting. Puts its characters in harrowing situations that make you wonder - what would YOU have done differently ?!?
April 9, 2024
On the side of too much description for what was theme I thought.
May 6, 2010
Some alien convicts crash on earth and end up hiding out in a prison in the U.S.A. They end up taking over the prison and making it their little kingdom. I actually liked these aliens, but... The book had some seriously over the top stuff, like one scene the aliens took great pains to give this guy superior medical treatment so he would stay alive as long as possible while they dined on his raw still living body.
I think I might have actually given it 4 stars if it had not taken this weird twist.
I think I might have actually given it 4 stars if it had not taken this weird twist.
March 7, 2015
I read this many moons ago, like about ahh, well, 30 or 40. I think, kinda sorta. Somewhere round when I was in the Army. Like'd it then but don't remember a bloody thing about the story. Would like to find what I think now.
April 16, 2009
Couldn't finish this one. This book made me gag. The violent scenes were described in such graphic detail as to be nauseating.
April 14, 2014
Slow but OK
August 23, 2016
Do your self a favor and skip this book. The lack of reviews indicate how bad the book is, sorry to give the impression it is better than it is.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews