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Technothriller

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: RED SUN RISING

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A change of pace in this month’s TTH blog; previously I’ve concentrated on prose fiction technothrillers with a western origin, but this time I’m taking a look at a Japanese manga series, the classic Cold War submarine drama Chinmoku no Kantai – The Silent Service.

In the depths of the ocean, one man pushes the world to the edge of Armageddon in a deadly game of nuclear poker… The captain of a ballistic missile submarine, capable of launching multiple ICBMs, he leads his pursuers on a dangerous chase as he races across the sea to gain his own kind of freedom…

Created by writer and artist Kaiji Kawaguchi, winner of the Kodansha publishing house’s Manga Award in 1990, The Silent Service was a modern-day military fiction tale of submarine warfare and political intrigue in the style popularised by authors like Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Mark Joseph and others. Serialised in the weekly Japanese manga magazine Comic Morning from 1988 to 1996, it was later republished in 32 paperback-sized ‘tankōbon’ volumes.

The Silent Service opens with a collision between a Japanese and a Russian submarine, in which the Japanese sub sinks with all hands – but the incident is actually a smokescreen for a secret project between the Japanese ‘deep state’ and the United States Navy to launch Japan’s first nuclear submarine. But when the sub – the Seabat – begins sea trials, its commander Captain Shiro Kaieda leads the crew to take over the sub, and run for deep water.

In subsequent issues, Kaieda tangles with the American navy, running rings around them as they desperately attempt to capture him and his war-load of nuclear missiles. Re-naming his sub Yamato, Kaieda declares his vessel an independent state, heightening nuclear tension around the globe, pushing the governments of the world steps closer to conflict. The sub’s new name is freighted with meaning – not only the name of the ill-fated World War II battleship that was the pride of the Japanese navy, but it’s also an ancient term for the nation of Japan itself.

Finally, after trouncing the fleets of the Soviet and American navies (including sinking the aircraft carrier Midway and the battleship New Jersey) the Yamato‘s captain reveals his true intentions – to force the major powers of the world accept a United Nations mandate over the control of nuclear weapons. The plot thickens when the Japanese Prime Minister allies with Kaieda and offers to place all of Japan’s Self-Defence Forces under UN command to accomplish that goal. American response is less than warm, and tensions flare as the Yamato is pursued by hunter-killer subs intent on destroying the renegade and restoring the world’s nuclear status quo.

Kawaguchi’s presentation of contemporary military hardware and equipment is dead on, as he draws attack submarines of all nationalities, destroyers and frigates, battleships, aircraft carriers, helicopters and jet fighters. His views of the cramped interiors of subs accurately convey the atmosphere of tension around the characters; even the uniforms are detailed, right down to the shoulder braid on the uncannily always-pristine Kaieda. The style is crisp and uncluttered, working to highlight the technology of the world’s navies, as well as their sailors. The action sequences are swift and fluid, and the constant baseline of danger is always evident – among the most dramatic sequences are a sub-versus-sub battle beneath the Arctic ice pack, and a missile-laden battle in New York Harbor, concluding with the dramatic ramming of the Yamato by an F-14 Tomcat.

At the time of release, in a period of political and economic change in Japan, the manga’s challenging plotline was the focus of great media attention, to the extent that it was publicly debated in the Japanese parliament. Kawaguchi was no stranger to controversy, having previously created Eagle, a series about a Japanese-American senator on the road to win the US presidency, and he would later write Zipang, about a modern Japanese warship thrown back in time to the Battle of Midway. Like The Silent Service, these stories take a hard, uncompromising look at Japanese-American geopolitics.

Viewing it from a 2020’s perspective, The Silent Service can be thought of as a modern-day Captain Nemo tale, with nuclear-tipped ICBMs frightening the world into peace and disarmament. But the nationalist themes in the plot made uncomfortable but compelling reading to many Japanese, throwing a spotlight on the relationship between Japan and the USA, and the Security Treaty between the two nations forged in the wake of WWII; and some American readers saw the series as jingoistic wish-fulfillment, as the Yamato humiliates Western military forces again and again. But it’s interesting to note that the right-leaning elements of the narrative are later balanced out by Captain Kaidea’s leftist ideals of unilateral nuclear disarmament. However, as happened with so many Cold War technothrillers of its era, The Silent Service was undone by the pace of real world events, with the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, shifts in Japanese political and military spheres, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the final analysis, Kawaguchi presents a story of a man who has taken a side, and for whatever reasons will fight to bring about what he thinks is right.

With over 25 million copies published, The Silent Service was a bestseller. Along with video game adaptations, a three-part anime series was produced (the first two episodes of which were translated for the US market), and it also inspired a South Korean version in 1999 (Phantom: The Submarine). A similar concept also appears in the 2012 TV series Last Resort, centring the action on a US Navy sub that, like Kaidea’s Yamato, declares itself an independent nuclear power after a “deep state” conspiracy goes awry. More recently, Amazon Studios and Toho have collaborated on a live-action TV version of The Silent Service to be screened later in 2023.

[This blog is based on an article that originally appeared Anime UK Magazine #5 in 1991]

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: SPLINTER CELL

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This, the first of my irregular TTH blogs for 2023, may come off as a little self-serving, as I’ll be looking over a series of novels that I’ve written for – and not so coincidentally, one that has a new release in the UK this month! I apologize for nothing! I’m as much a fan of these books as I am a contributor – an action packed series of “operator thrillers” based on a blockbuster video game franchise, endorsed by none other than that technothriller titan, Tom Clancy himself…

Published by Ubisoft in 2002, the first Splinter Cell video game was the second original project under the “Tom Clancy’s” banner following the previous year’s Ghost Recon, building out the franchise from titles based directly on Clancy’s fiction. Set in what was then the near future of 2004, the titular Splinter Cell is grizzled covert operative Sam Fisher (voiced by the iconic Michael Ironside), a former US Navy SEAL recruited to become a lone wolf agent for Third Echelon (later evolving into Fourth Echelon) – a secret program created by America’s National Security Agency to conduct covert intelligence-gathering missions in hostile territory, and to seek out, engage and destroy hi-tech threats to global security.

Splinter Cell helped define the “stealth-shooter” genre of games, and over the next decade the series became a firm favourite with gamers, followed by sequels Pandora Tomorrow (2004), Chaos Theory (2005), Essentials and Double Agent (both 2006), Conviction (2010), and Blacklist (2013). Sam Fisher would also make appearances in several other games and two comics miniseries (Echoes and Digging in the Ashes) – but this is a blog about thriller novels, so it’s the prose spin-offs that we’re looking at here…

Berkley Books published the first tie-in novels under the house pseudonym ‘David Michaels’ (along with other fiction based on games from the Tom Clancy’s banner like Ghost Recon, EndWar and HAWX), starting in 2004 with Splinter Cell.

Like all of the novels to date, this was an original story spinning off from the established continuity of the games; in it, Fisher faces The Shadows, a terrorist cadre in league with The Shop, international arms dealers who are targeting Third Echelon personnel for assassination.

Splinter Cell the novel was a hit for Berkley, posting on both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s bestseller lists, followed a year later by Operation Barracuda, which mirrored the success of its predecessor. In the second book, Fisher goes after The Shop, ultimately uncovering a deadly plan to trigger a nuclear device off the US coast. Written in the first-person to emulate the perspective of players in the Splinter Cell video games, the first two novels were penned by Raymond Benson, an author known for his work on James Bond fiction in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s. Benson’s other work adapting game-worlds to prose covered franchises like Homefront and Hitman – and notably Metal Gear Solid, a popular series of Japanese stealth-shooter games to which the Splinter Cell titles were seen as the Western equivalent.

Benson left the series with the third book, as Grant Blackwood took over behind the house name for the next two Splinter Cell novels. Blackwood, an experienced thriller writer known for collaborations with Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and James Rollins, dropped Benson’s first-person perspective for 2006’s Checkmate as well as plot threads set up in the previous books. Instead, the third novel concentrates on new antagonists as Fisher races to intercept a cargo ship loaded with radioactive material before it can be used against the United States. Blackwood continued a year later with Fallout, which introduced a revenge plot based around Fisher’s adoptive brother, a coup in the nation of Kyrgyzstan and a plot to destroy global oil resources.

With Splinter Cell: Conviction, the fifth game in the series, planned to be released in 2010, Ubisoft and Berkeley engaged more closely, presenting novels that dovetailed with the narrative of the new game rather than being purely stand-alone tales. And in 2009, another new writer came in under the ‘Michaels’ pseudonym, this time Peter Telep, an experienced tie-in novelist with a thriller pedigree (having penned the Force 5 Recon, Armored Corps and Night Angel 9 series, among others).

Telep’s first Splinter Cell novel, also titled Conviction, was released a few months before the game, acting as a prequel to its narrative where Fisher is cast as a rogue agent out on his own and is no longer a part of Third Echelon. In the novel, Fisher is being hunted by a new team of Splinter Cell operatives, and their perspective on these events is presented in Telep’s next book Endgame, which was released shortly after.

There would be a three year gap until Sam Fisher returned in the video game Splinter Cell: Blacklist, which rebooted the franchise with Eric Johnson taking over the role as a younger iteration of the series’ protagonist. Published several months after Blacklist’s release, Telep returned for the tie-in novel Blacklist: Aftermath, which followed up the events of the game with Fisher and the new Fourth Echelon agency racing to track down a Russian computer genius being forced to create an unstoppable virus program.

Aftermath was the first Splinter Cell novel to drop the ‘Michaels’ pseudonym, and the last to be published by Berkley Books’ parent company Penguin. With no new Splinter Cell games on the horizon and only guest-starring appearances for Sam Fisher in other titles like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, the franchise laid fallow until the early 2020’s when hints of a new iteration began to bubble up.

In the interim, publisher Aconyte Books began producing tie-in fiction based on several Ubisoft games, including Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs and another Tom Clancy’s title, The Division. Their association also returned the Splinter Cell to prose in 2022 with the eighth novel in the series, Firewall, written by…me!

Set several years after the events of Blacklist, Firewall has Fisher forced to work alongside his estranged daughter Sarah as he faces off against an assassin from his past, in the search for a powerful cyberwarfare technology on sale to the highest bidder. Firewall was the first Splinter Cell novel also to be released in audiobook, and in late 2022, it was adapted into a full-cast audio drama series for BBC Radio 4. This year, I’ve followed up Firewall with Dragonfire, in which Fisher is disavowed and left for dead deep inside North Korea, while Sarah desperately works to assemble an off-the-books mission to rescue him before it is too late.

What I enjoy about these novels is how all the different writers who’ve taken on Sam Fisher tap into the essential elements of the character – the cold-eyed lone wolf, the wry veteran with nerves of steel and a set of high-tech kit, the one man on a mission against impossible odds. Playing as Sam in the games is a lot of fun, and reading him is just as good. If you play the games, the books are a must-read – and if you don’t, they’re a great addition to the “Clancyverse” for anyone who enjoys some fast-paced technothrills.

I stated up front that I’m a fan of the Splinter Cell saga, and so I’ve done my best not only to hold to the lore of the games but also to give a nod back to the work of Benson, Blackwood and Telep in the earlier novels. Click on the titles to read about my novels in the Splinter Cell series, Firewall and Dragonfire.

But what does the future hold for Sam Fisher and the Splinter Cell program? A remake of the original Splinter Cell game is currently being developed at Ubisoft’s Toronto studio, and an animated series (see above) is in the works at Netflix, with John Wick writer Derek Kolstad in the driving seat.

And as for more novels; there’s certainly more stories about Sam Fisher yet to be told…

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: THE FOXBAT INCIDENT

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A lone pilot from an elite flying corps, isolated and disenchanted with the politicking of his own superiors, decides to take the biggest risk of his life – he will steal the world’s fastest jet interceptor and run the gauntlet of a super-power’s vast military machine.

Escape means freedom; capture means death… Or worse.

If this reads to you like the back cover blurb from a high-octane techno thriller, you’re not far off the mark! Craig Thomas’s classic 1977 Cold War adventure Firefox shares more than a little plot DNA with this narrative. But this isn’t from a novel… It’s a true story.

46 years ago this week, Soviet fighter pilot Lieutenant Viktor Belenko defected to the West by hijacking his own aircraft from an airstrip near Vladivostok, and fled to political asylum across the Sea of Japan.

He brought with him a fully-operational MiG-25, codenamed “Foxbat” by NATO, a jet that the Western powers knew next to nothing about, the capabilities of which were rumoured to be little short of extraordinary.

Belenko’s defection in 1976 was a huge news story at the height of the Cold War, and it caused a spike in international tensions at a time when Russia and the United States of America both had their fingers on the nuclear button.

There was a very real fear of a follow-up Russian attack on Japan to destroy the stolen Foxbat, enough that it would change the course of military procurement for the under-prepared Japanese Air Self Defense Force.

But as thriller writers always pull from the real world (it’s a tradition I’ve followed with my Marc Dane novels!) it’s no surprise that Belenko’s flight to freedom – and his iconic aircraft – inspired some action-packed fiction.

Thomas’s Firefox (which you can read more about in my blog from last month) was released a year later and makes specific mention of the incident. In that novel, American fighter ace Mitchell Gant infiltrates the heart of the Soviet Union to steal the titular experimental fighter plane before it can radically alter the balance of global air power. Publisher Sphere gambled on the strength of public interest in the Belenko story by releasing an expanded paperback print-run for Firefox, and the novel was an instant best-seller.

In the jet-wake of Thomas’s success, Futura contracted author Peter Cave to bash out Foxbat for 1978, a ‘paperback spectacular’ based on ‘known fact’. It’s an unreconstructed novel spinning a lurid what-if story of Lieutenant Mikhail Vologsky, a Russian pilot disrespected by his Soviet commanders and manipulated by American agents into defecting with his MiG. Cave was better known for his earlier work writing pulpy narratives featuring wanton women and outlaw bikers, and tie-ins to The New Avengers TV series – in Foxbat, the embattled pilot is the only innocent character in a sea of double-crossers, murderers, spies and deceivers.

Along with novels, there was also a notable (and somewhat cheesy) Hong Kong action movie that built a plot around the true story – Operation Foxbat (1977) opens with a reconstruction of the MiG’s forced landing before veering off into a wild chase story. Pitting KGB assassins against a CIA agent, they race to recover a microfilm capsule containing the MiG’s blueprints…which is inadvertently swallowed by a short-order cook with a sweet tooth! Check out the trailer below…

But the legacy of the Belenko defection did not fade away after the 70s, and in 2007 author Peter Stuart Smith (writing under the pen-name “James Barrington”) published a novel also titled Foxbat, the fourth book in his series featuring Paul Richter, an ex-Royal Navy aviator turned covert operative.

Barrington’s plot orbits around a key factor regarding the real-life Foxbat’s avionics systems: in the 70’s, NATO and the US believed the MiG-25 was at the cutting edge of technology, but after getting a first-hand look at the jet they discovered its capabilities were not as fearsome as they had expected. Notably, rather than use modern solid-state electronics, the Foxbat had vacuum-tube hardware – and while this was decidedly obsolete tech, it was also very robust and resistant to the effects of electromagnetic pulses from nuclear detonations. Barrington’s Foxbat plays on this idea as modern-day North Korean agents amass a fleet of stolen MiG-25s for a planned first strike against the South – intending to claim total air superiority by deploying the EMP-resistant Foxbats after a lightning-strike nuclear bombardment. The novel concludes with a blistering air battle as Richter leads a flight of Harrier jump-jets against the MiG force.

And as for the real thing? The Foxbat that landed in Japan was dismantled and examined by engineers, but ultimately returned to the USSR (and the $10 million bill for damage done the Kremlin sent to Tokyo went unpaid). Nearly thirty years would pass before the US were able to finally secure an intact MiG-25 after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As for its pilot, Viktor Belenko was officially granted political asylum and later became an American citizen, working as a consultant for the military and the aerospace industry; his story is detailed in John Barron’s 1980 book MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko.

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: FIREFOX AT 45

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Say the word ‘Firefox’ and most people will think you’re talking about a type of web browser – but that name evokes very different notions to aviation nerds and techno thriller fans of a certain vintage: a jet black stealth fighter, spy drama behind the Iron Curtain and Clint Eastwood thinking in Russian…

This week marks Firefox‘s 45th anniversary – that’s Welsh author Craig Thomas’s original novel, not the Eastwood movie (which itself turned 40 a couple of months ago). First published in 1977, It’s a war thriller with a Cold War twist: the enemy has a prototype secret weapon that could upset the balance of power, and the good guys want it dealt with… But unlike WWII era stories such as The Guns of Navarone or 633 Squadron, where heroes go behind enemy lines to blow something up, in Firefox it’s the mission of veteran USAF pilot Mitchell Gant to infiltrate deep into Soviet Russia to find the titular MiG-31 fighter jet…and steal it!

Firefox is a game of two halves – first a taut espionage tale as Gant tries to stay one step ahead of the KGB and get to the base where the jet is being test-flown, then an aerial action thriller as the stolen MiG thunders across Russian airspace with the entire might of the Soviet military trying to clip its wings. It’s a classic of the form that has been emulated and echoed many times since.

Back in 1977, the bleeding-edge hardware of Firefox looked more like science-fiction, but four decades on, the jet’s stealth technology, hypersonic speed and brain-computer interface all seem cleverly prescient in light of real-world military innovations. Thomas based his fictional MiG-31 Firefox on the real MiG-25 Foxbat, a powerful supersonic aircraft that ruled the Soviet skies; an actual MiG-31 (codenamed Foxhound) went into service a few years after the novel was published, ostensibly as a high-speed interceptor designed to chase the unstoppable SR-71 Blackbird spy plane… But that’s a whole other story…

MiG-25 Foxbat
MiG-31 Foxhound

Firefox the novel was a bestseller – UK publisher Sphere printed an hefty 250,000-copy print run of the paperback, capitalizing on reader interest in the real-life defection of Soviet fighter pilot Viktor Belenko, who had stolen a Foxbat and fled to Japan the previous year. Thomas is even timely enough to have the Russian pilot’s defection briefly discussed by characters in the novel, prior to Gant’s mission…

Coming out in 1982 (one of the greatest years for classic genre movies ever!) the Firefox feature film wasn’t a huge hit, but it gained a bit of cult cachet in time, and the book’s success was enough that Thomas wrote a sequel.

Firefox Down picks up right after the final chapter of Firefox, with Gant in the cross-hairs of the KGB and the black jet still not out of the woods. Thomas would later bring the character back for more adventures in his novels Winter Hawk (1987) and A Different War (1997).

A benchmark techno thriller, the case can be made that Firefox – and in fact a lot of Thomas’s writing – did much to define that sub-genre, many years before it was blasted into the pop culture mainstream by Tom Clancy’s blockbuster The Hunt for Red October.

All the classic techno thriller elements are in place – a clash between monolithic Cold War powers; tense espionage shenanigans; a flawed protagonist; and a really cool piece of military hardware.

Like a lot of Craig Thomas’s back-catalogue, the novel has been out of print for nearly two decades – but recently his works were sold to new rights holders, and in October of 2022 it will return in a new edition published by Canelo as part of their ‘Action’ imprint, which you can pre-order at this link.

The Firefox will fly again…!

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: GO FOR ORBIT

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In 1981, spaceflight changed forever with the launch of the first manned reusable spacecraft – the Space Shuttle Colombia. Born into the twilight years of the Apollo missions, the Shuttle was the delta-winged symbol of space travel I grew up with, and over the decades I watched its highs and lows – including witnessing the maiden launch of STS-49 Endeavour, one of the most incredible experiences of my life – and I followed the flights until the program was retired in 2011.

So it’s no surprise, with the heyday of the Shuttle program overlapping with the 80s-90s golden age of techno thrillers, that there’s a sub-genre of novels featuring NASA’s iconic Orbiter emblazoned across their covers.

Space Age thrillers didn’t start with the Shuttle – Martin Caidin’s Marooned and The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls (both 1965) are two great examples published before the Moon landing – but it’s undeniable the Shuttle captured the imagination of writers.

One the earliest iterations I’ve come across of a Space Shuttle playing a key role in a techno thriller narrative is in The Dynostar Menace (1975) by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (two names well-known to fans of Doctor Who), a novel about sabotage and murder aboard an orbiting space-lab, written two years before the real Shuttle began its flight tests – but it’s Christopher Wood’s adaptation of the James Bond movie Moonraker (1979) that really kicks off Shuttle stories with a bang! Wood’s tie-in follows the film (leaving the Ian Fleming origin material by the wayside) in a story about megalomaniac Hugo Drax’s plan to use a fleet of Shuttles as part of a scheme to depopulate the world.

I’ve found that most Shuttle-centric novels fall into one of four categories: the first is the disaster story, where something goes horribly wrong and the clock is running down to something even worse. Scott Asnin’s story A Cold Wind From Orion (1980) has the titular space platform and its nuclear payload trapped in a decaying orbit as Shuttle crews race to the rescue, while Lee Correy’s novel Shuttle Down (1980) deals with a failed launch that forces the Shuttle Atlantis to make an emergency landing on Easter Island. Correy’s novel shares its title with a 2007 Commando comic story and a 2000 novel in the Chopper Ops series by Mack Maloney, both of which also feature Shuttles making forced landings.

It’s the Orbiter itself in danger in David C. Onley’s Shuttle (1981) as mission control mounts a mid-flight recovery, and Alpha Bug (1987) by M.E. Morris also features an on-orbit rescue mission, this time for a Soviet spaceplane. John-Allen Price wrote his take on a similar plotline in The Pursuit of the Phoenix (1990), where an American commander and a crew of untested trainees must rescue stranded cosmonauts.

Price’s follow-up to Pursuit nicely illustrates the second Shuttle novel category: the hijack story. In Phoenix Uncaged (1993), the Shuttle crew (once again) make an emergency landing, this time in the Marxist-controlled Seychelles where they are accused of spying and their ship is to be auctioned off to Libya. One of the earliest ‘hijack’ stories is a great piece of tech-heavy hard sci-fi in The Descent of Anansi (1982) by Larry Niven & Steven Barnes; in this novel, the crew of an orbital factory manufacturing super-strong ‘nanowire’ declare independence and hijack the Shuttle Anansi and its crew – but the astronauts hatch a plan to emulate the shuttle’s spider-god namesake using orbital tethers to escape their captors.

In James Follett’s Dominator (1985), the titular Shuttle’s cargo and crew are held for ransom, a theme revisited with gusto in Storming Intrepid (1988) by Payne Harrison, and Night Launch (1989), which is the only novel featured here written by an actual astronaut, Jake Garn, along with co-author Stephen Paul Cohen. Mark Washburn’s The Omega Threat (1982) follows the hijack model but with a hidden bomb aboard an orbiting Shuttle, while Ignition (1988) by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason, has the Shuttle Atlantis is trapped on the launch pad when terrorists take over mission control, setting off a deadly countdown to blow it up unless their demands are met.

The third category of Shuttle thrillers is the sabotage story, and for this we can begin by going back to 80’s with the long-running, two-fisted Nick Carter: Killmaster pulp series and The Solar Menace (1980), where Shuttle launches are being sabotaged by Russian agents to protect a diabolical new weapon. A second Killmaster story – Death Orbit (1986) – has Carter back on the trail of move Soviet saboteurs, and Shuttles also feature in a couple of other “men’s adventure” series: Revenge of the Master (1985), an entry in the Track series by Jerry Ahern and Sky Killers (2002) by Nick Pollotta, from Don Pendleton’s Stony Man series. S.V. Date’s Final Orbit (1997) features an acerbic veteran astronaut chasing down murders and a cover-up in orbit with a killer, while Siege of Lightning by R.J. Pineiro (1993) deals with industrial espionage and the fatal threat of sabotage during a Shuttle’s maiden voyage.

The fourth category ties into another 80’s techno thriller gimmick, the “Star Wars” Strategic Defence Initiative program; that promised to deter nuclear ICBMs, but in reality proved to be technologically infeasible. In several of these novels, it’s up to fearless Shuttle astronauts to face down SDI weapons, sometimes under the control of the Soviets (1981’s The Hunting of Salyut 7 by Brendan Guy Alimo, 1983’s Blind Prophet by Bart Davis, 1987’s Winter Hawk by Craig Thomas, 1989’s Star Shot by Douglas Terman), operated by terrorists (2005’s Dead Rising by Jeff Rovin) or US tech gone rogue (1985’s The Glass Lady by D.J. Savage). Other “war in space” elements appear in Derek Lambert’s The Red Dove (1983), with nuclear-armed Russian Shuttles and orbital laser battle-stations in Dale Brown’s Silver Tower (1988).

This blog is more a tour through some of my own collection than an exhaustive list of Shuttle novels, so feel free to drop me a line if you know of one I’ve missed!

TECHNO THRILLER HEAVEN: THE LOST PHANTOM

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My enthusiasm for a certain stripe of 80’s-90’s technothriller novel hasn’t dimmed since the day I got my hands on a paperback of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. As a genre benchmark, its setting and themes are among the most prevalent in books of the same mil-spec class – born out of the dark potential of the Cold War, alongside tales of daring jet pilots or tanks clashing in the Fulda Gap, are the novels of next-generation sea-power.

For the most part – thanks to the long shadow cast by Clancy’s blockbuster – the technothriller ocean is largely the domain of the submarine. But there are a few surface war tales that cruise among the steel sharks, and a favourite of mine are the ‘USS Cunningham’ novels by the late James H. Cobb, centred around naval officer Amanda Lee Garrett, the commander of the titular US Navy warship, a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art stealth destroyer with its own attack helicopter unit.

I was first introduced to the USS Cunningham books by a fellow technothriller aficionado, who suggested I read Choosers of the Slain, the opening salvo in Cobb’s series, first published in 1996. The novel essentially re-stages the Falklands War in Antarctica, when Argentine forces make a land grab for oil fields under the ice, and the newly-promoted Commander Amanda Garrett is placed in the firing line of this unexpected conflict. I sourced a second-hand copy of Choosers and bolted through it – and as soon as I was done, I immediately chased down copies of the other four novels in the series!

To find a female C/O in the boy’s club of technothriller protagonists was a rarity in the 1990s, much less one who anchored a whole series; Amanda Garrett is described thusly: “a headstrong, bold, and tenacious commander. Sleek and swift in leading her elite team in countering cyber, terrorist and political threats, she grows from an untested junior officer into a hardened commander as the series progresses…”

Storm Dragon, published a year later, has Garrett and the Cunningham crew in the middle of a full-blown three-sided war between Taiwan, rebel forces and the People’s Republic of China. This second book was re-named Sea Strike for its US release – according to the author, his American publisher felt the original title sounded too much like a fantasy novel; Sea Fighter followed in 1999, set in West Africa as a renegade general seizes power and threatens to plunge the entire region into open conflict; the fourth book Target Lock was released in 2001, taking place in Indonesia, with Garrett crossing paths with a modern pirate warlord.

Cobb writes classic high-stakes naval thrillers, with appealing characters and military action across all these novels, and while some of the geopolitics have since fallen out of step with the real world, the pace of the books remains engaging.

For almost two decades, the Cunningham series was out of print and seemed doomed to languish in the Davey Jones’ Locker of second-hand bookstores, as mainstream reader tastes fell away from these kind of stories. But as time passed, and as technothrillers old and new gained a renewed existence in digital formats, Cobb’s novels reappeared on the radar.

Silvertail Books, a British independent publisher, worked with the author’s estate to get the Cunningham series out of dry-dock and seaworthy once again – something I was very pleased to see! But there was one small thing…

Target Lock was the final voyage for the Cunningham… Or so it might have seemed. Silvertail billed its new eBook releases as “The USS Cunningham Quartet”, but what they didn’t know was that there was actually another novel – titled Phantom Force, which Cobb had written in the late 2000s but which had never been published in the English language.

I couldn’t let this go unremarked – mostly because I wanted to read this long-lost volume for myself! – so via back channels I reached out to Humfrey Hunter, Silvertail’s publisher, who was surprised to learn that the Quartet was actually a Quintet. Thus armed with details and the title, Silvertail were able to locate the missing Phantom Force manuscript among the papers of Cobb’s estate and eleven years after the publication of its predecessor, finally bring it to readers. The novel picks up where Target Lock left off, with Amanda Garrett leading the hunt for an elusive target across the islands of Indonesia.

Cobb had written Phantom Force in the early 2000s, but while it had been published in Japan and Germany, his US-based publisher GP Putnam decided to pass on another book in the series, leaving English-speaking readers out in the cold. While Cobb kept on writing with his mystery fiction and The Arctic Event, a great novel in Robert Ludlum’s Covert-One series, he offered Phantom Force to Baen Books.

Known for their military science fiction output, Baen would give a home to a short story from the USS Cunningham saga – “The First Cup of Coffee War”, in the anthology Future Weapons of War – but ultimately they passed on publishing the Garrett novels themselves. As Cobb himself said in a 2007 internet post “No hard feelings, they just thought that it’s a little too far out of their chosen field.” But throughout 2007 and 2008, Cobb was still hoping to get the series back in play, even hinting at “an all new Amanda project in the near future involving another major technothriller author”. What that might have been would be interesting to know!

He was also set to write another Covert-One novel (to be titled either The Infinity Affair or The Vulcan Possession), but health issues began to impinge on his career. In June 2014, Cobb’s friend and colleague Jeff Knutson revealed that the author was suffering with non-Hodgkin lymphoma but still continuing to write as best he could; however, just a month later Cobb passed away at the age of 61, leaving a set of solid page-turning thrillers and mysteries, and a small but dedicated readership.

But good stories always find a home, and Silvertail have relaunched James H. Cobb’s USS Cunningham stories for a brand new audience of readers to enjoy – visit their website here, or check out the novels themselves at this link.