The Firefly Collective: A Review

NC native and Brownsville, Texas denizen, Ryan McGinnis has just graced us with his newest novel, The Firefly Collective. It was published just last week and out of his four novels, it’s certainly the best of the bunch. I’m told his next is hot on its heels. In the past two years, since McGinnis’s debut as a novelist (Tears of the Dragon), he has been honing his craft and developing stronger and stronger material all the while. This newest novel evinces those newfound powers and leaves readers, myself included, begging for more (and hopefully even longer) installments in the future. To stay updated on his process and get first dibs on chapter excerpts from those upcoming projects as they appear, follow his website and be sure to join his email list.

In The Firefly Collective, McGinnis turns his focus back to the cast of characters we’ve come to know quite well through the first three novels and one novella of his Xavier Greene series. After the events of The Osiris Initiative, when Xavier, Stacy Martinez, and Bill Logan-members of different governmental and secret organizations-were forced to join forces to take down the mysterious Axion corporation; and The Delicate Art of Death where Stacy’s attempt at a peaceful return home is foiled as she investigates a series of suspicious murders in her hometown before becoming unwittingly ensnared in the web of a cryptic hunter of men; a new terrorist cell in Europe is targeting major tech companies and the crew once again cross paths to uncover what’s happening.

The Firefly Collective deepens the layers of complexity, conspiracy, and intrigue of the previous novels, drawing as much from imagination as from the stuff of life. Tech headquarters fall one after another, with no rhyme nor reason, seemingly being engulfed in flames by a series of detonations with no physical trace. that is, people know the buildings are being sabotaged, but cannot locate the bombs or bomb debris. And this despite the fact that the bombings are always presaged by warnings to media outlets and the corporations themselves with specific locations and times in each correspondence. This firefly bombing is ultimately revealed to be the product of a malignant force everyone in the Arab Gulf has come to dread in the 21st century: drone strikes. However, instead of the US targeting innocent civilians (or single individuals near civilians retroactively labeled collateral damage), terrorist organizations are targeting big business. Yet, their m.o., unlike that of the total warfare of the eco-terrorists in Tears of the Dragon, is commendable. They alert businesses ahead of time to the destruction, allowing employees and personnel to be evacuated, and destroy facilities (hitting the capitalists where it hurts them most: in the means of production alone) without collateral damage or loss of life of any kind. Nonetheless, Xavier takes an interest in the bombings and makes it a point to identify who is responsible and to prevent them from continuing.

If left there, the novel would unravel into little more than a pro-business, corporatist apology (The old non sequitur that only evil people use force to fight back against hegemonic forces). Instead, Xavier learns that the terrorist cell, the titular Firefly Collective, were once freedom fighters and progressive activists pushing back against the statist absolutism of British government. The head of the organization, Francisco Ortega, was once an idealistic young man working to change things and improve the lot of working class people. When his brother became terminally ill, requiring a costly life-saving procedure that the NHS would not provide him, Francisco found himself-through economic privation in a sick society-victim to what was left of Axion. The corporation offered the collective a huge payout to stage and enact a series of bombings, strategically placed near different targets than the tech companies themselves, and Francisco obliged. The novel is another strong indictment of how power corrupts, but McGinnis complicates the portrait with the context of structural inequalities and indictments of UK attempts to privatize healthcare and defund the NHS. The story calls readers to think more deeply about many associated issues such as organizational belonging and responsibility, the ineptitude and inefficiency of bureaucracy and bureaucratic compartmentalization, global economics, and homesteading and off-the-grid militancy (an attractive alternative to surveillance capitalism). At the end of the day, the novel is also a good spy thriller, a perfect airport read, and a work that engages one intellectually only as far as they wish to take it.

The Firefly Collective maintains its focus on the working of international cabals, secret syndicates, spycraft, assassinations, and gripping fight sequences that have held our intrigue thus far as readers. However, in the new novel, McGinnis displays an ever increasing deftness in his plotting and character development that had me riveted to my laptop the whole time I was reading. This is proficient work peppered with ruminations on power (both how it is gained and how its capture co-opts those who hold it by illicit means), manipulation, and the Realpolitik always operating beneath the surface ideals of state and corporate actors. And as always, the novel is just long enough to captivate the reader before dangling a wonderful bauble, a hint about what comes next. Think big, think ostentatious, think Japan!