The Zoo

Something is growing in the Sahara, and it is not supposed to be there. A jungle erupted overnight where there was only sand — green, wet, wrong — and every hour it spreads a little farther, breeding creatures that adapt faster than any weapon fired at them. Governments walled it off. Corporations noticed that the flowers inside are worth more than gold. So the contractors go in: mech-suited, underpaid, over-armed, chasing hazard pay through a biome designed, it seems, specifically to kill them. Welcome to the Zoo. Try to come back out. This is a shared near-future military-SF world built by Michael Anderle and a rotating crew of co-authors — L. A. Starkey, Jonathan P. Brazee, C. J. Fawcett among them — spread across roughly seven interlocking series. The flagship line, Birth of Heavy Metal, follows a scientist-turned-mercenary learning that a doctorate means nothing when a locust the size of a truck wants your throat. Around it run Apocalypse Paused, The BOHICA Chronicles, Soldiers of Fame and Fortune, Team Savage, McFadden and Banks, and Dark Angel Merchant Marines, each following different squads, jurisdictions, and paydays against the same encroaching green. The register is boots-and-bullets pulp: fast missions, banter under fire, salvage runs that curdle into last stands, with a thread of hard-SF mystery underneath about what the Zoo actually is and who woke it. It shares a publisher's DNA with the sprawling Kurtherian Gambit but stands entirely on its own. Newcomers should start with Birth of Heavy Metal, book one — it teaches you the ecosystem, the economy, and the fear, in that order — then branch by whichever squad you liked best.