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…
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…!
