Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆☆
From what I can tell, Arisen is a massive zombie apocalypse saga, with a heavy military focus, by Fuchs and Glyn James. There are fourteen books in the main series, but Fuchs has also spun off related sets to tell other stores set in the same universe, such as Arisen: Raiders. The Operators series appears to be another. It looks to be intended as a trilogy: at the time of writing (March), part one is out, with part two next month and the finale in 2026. It feels like subsequent installments might be more team-oriented, but part one? Hoo-boy.
Yeah, this is the first book to ever get a five-star action rating from me. It just doesn’t stop. There’s a sub-genre called “hard SF,” which according to Wikipedia, is “characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic.” I suggest this could be labelled as hard action, with a great deal of information about hardware, like guns and vehicles. Here’s a sample paragraph: “The boat itself is a low-observable, reconfigurable, multi-mission surface tactical mobility craft with a primary role to insert and extract SOF in high-threat environments, but can also be used for fire support, maritime interdiction, and VBSS missions, as well as CT and FID ops.” I’m not sure what much of that means. Though I suddenly have a strong urge for a glass of whisky and a cigar.
The heroine here is Yaël Sion, an Israeli special forces soldier, who lost her parents in a terrorist attack when she was young, and has become utterly self-reliant as a result. We begin with her part of an operation against Palestinian terrorists on the West Bank. But it’s not long before the pandemic strikes, and political concerns become irrelevant, as the world turns into a hellhole. Every hour brings a new, ferocious battle for survival, and any sanctuary can suddenly become a deathtrap. It’s positively relentless, Yaël needing to fight not the infected, but the living. Things perhaps peak in an ocean-side fire-fight simultaneously involving the Israeli military, Hamas terrorists, civilians desperate to escape, and the undead. And Yaël, who just wants the boat described above.
While the open water is relatively safe, it’s hardly the end of her problems, as she encounters survivors, good and bad. It’s a chilling realization that survival means suppressing the natural human desire to help, even when this means condemning them to death. Yaël is utterly ruthless when she needs to be, and certainly has the skills to handle the situation. I’d love to see a movie made of this, though to some extent we already did: World War Z is a clear touchstone, with other genre classics also referenced, such as Aliens. The action here is almost non-stop, very well written, and considering the book is 573 pages, I raced through it. If any of the other entries are GWG-oriented, I’m certainly going to check them out. Just as soon as my heart-rate returns to normal.
Author: Michael Stephen Fuchs
Publisher: PF Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 1 (for now) in Arisen: Operators. But as discussed above – it’s complicated…