There are some books that immediately haunt you, ripping through the shell of fiction, slamming you emotionally against a wall and burning vivid images into your dreams. Then there are some books that you pick up and from the first page it’s hard work; you feel you ought to finish but just can’t summon the willpower.
What’s especially interesting is when the same author writes two books in the same sequence which peg the scale at opposite ends. In this case it’s the new e-book self-publishing sensation: Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga, comprising Wool and Shift. (The third book in the trilogy, Dust, has been released this month, and I’m probably going to read it, if only to find out how the story ends. However, I’m not expecting it to thrill me as much as the five-star Amazon rave reviews suggest.)
This is a spoiler-heavy review, and it will be long and meandering. If you haven’t read these books, I would suggest you click away now.
First, let me say I’m what you might call a failed writer. I’ve dabbled in interactive fiction, and my works not in progress far outweigh my completions. I’m intrigued by the process of writing and worldbuilding, but I’m not particularly good at making stories come together. As a failed writer rather than a successful one, I’m more interested in failure than success; not because I wish the author badly, but because looking at a perfect completed work can be very daunting. It’s sometimes more funl to look at something that almost works but doesn’t quite, and wonder what made it break and how it was supposed to go together. And if you can see the seams where the different modules were welded, so much the better.
RIght. So a precis. Wool is a bit of an accidental self-publishing sensation: it started as an unassuming SF-horror short story and then, because it sold so well on Kindle, was rapidly expanded into a series of novellas, then became a proper paper novel, then gathered two sequels. Most of the press around this story, as with Harry Potter, Twilight and 50 Shades, is the meta-story of the unknown author’s sudden triumph. But leaving the meta aside, the infrastructure of this overnight success has cast its own shadow. A tiny self-contained tale grew in the telling, and in growing it inevitably suffered from a lot of retroactive continuity. And that means things break.
The original Wool short is a nice Twilight Zoney twist on a classic SF trope: the sealed doomsday refuge with a false apocalypse outside. When I say this is a classic, I mean it’s pretty much the first story everyone thinks of doing with any kind of post-apocalypse. Just in film, let’s see: Logan’s Run, THX-1138¸ The Island, City of Ember. In TV, pretty much every Star Trek episode where Kirk shouts at a computer. You all know the drill off by heart now, right? There’s some kind of domed city or sealed underground complex, people are cooped up inside to escape the big scary end of the world scenario outside, they’ve been there for generations, they’d like to go outside (because everyone wants to go outside). But they can’t go outside! The elders tell them they can’t, and the elders must know best. They conspire to hide the truth. A lone rebel or group of rebels won’t accept this old hearsay and go to learn the truth for themseves. They break the law, and are banished to the Outside for their crime. And yay! The apocalypse is over, or perhaps it never was. Bright sunsets! Humanity is reborn! Roll credits.
Wool’s original story subverts this (because this is such an old chestnut it has to do something). There’s an underground silo (one assumes a nuclear bunker) with a spiral stair and over a hundred levels. People have been living their they don’t know how long. There’s a wallscreen on the top level on which they can see a ruined toxic landscape. It’s right there, but if you ever ask to go outside you get instantly banished, which is death – but first you have to wear a biohazard suit and clean the cameras. Which everyone does! The protagonist’s wife goes digging in the computers (the silo has around early 2000s-level tech – desktop computers and server farms but no mobiles) and finds out there were uprisings every 20 years or so for who knows how long back. She finds that the wallscreen view can be faked with a program. She goes mad, believes that the apocalypse is fake, goes outside, cleans, and “dies”. The protagonist eventually follows her, and finds that the apocalypse is of course fake! It’s really blue skies and green grass and wildflowers!
Except it’s not. When he takes his helmet off, it’s still a toxic wasteland and he dies. The Big Lie wasn’t the apocalypse, it was the brief moment of hope via CGI given to the cleaners, so that they would clean and thereby serve the colony in their last moments.
So far, so good. A nice weird silo story that doesn’t make much sense when you think about it (wait, so they just sacrifice all that plastic? and the computer chips? to kill someone? just to clean cameras you could put a wiper on? every few years? for centuries…?) but at least has a surreal dream-logic and has characters who start where the reader already is, questioning the reality of their prison, and stops after it’s finished. It’s grim and saturated in fatalism and defeat, but at least that’s somewhat interesting.
Then the novel begins. Now comes the hard part: trying to build a plausible SF world from this one-shot disposable grimdark twistaplot, and evolve it into a more human story that has some element of hope to it. And that turns out to be a lot harder, but Howey (mostly) pulls it off with two strong female central characters, a modestly well-built universe with a lot of handwaving of the mechanicals, and some incandescent sentences which are just jawdroppingly hearbreakingly good.
Juliette is a genius mechanical worker from the bottom of the silo (which is structured as an absurdly literal social hierarchy, as is the way of most poorly thought-through social-commentary SF) who is nominated as mayor by the previous (female) mayor before she dies. She investigates the death of the two cleaners from the opening story but is thwarted and imprisoned by the evil head of Information Technology, who runs all the computers and presumably keeps all the silo’s secrets. She’s sent out to clean and die, but being a Mary Sue hacker genius she hacks the suit design process through her friends in Mechanical. Turns out IT has been deliberately building bad suits, and not (as the whole silo has thought for generations) slowly improving them through the sacrifice of cleaners to prepare for mankind’s glorious re-emergence into the sun. So she survives long enough to walk over a hill and find out that…
… that there are a whole bunch of other silos all built next to each other, which shows that the ancient silo builders were completely lousy disaster planners, but anyway. The next silo over has conveniently suffered a grim yet cosy catastrophe, such that the normally sealed airlock door is conveniently propped open by thousands of dead bodies yet she can open it with only a wrench, there’s still a breathable atmosphere inside, and she can jury-rig a makeshift chemical decontamination shower against the unknown but assumed-to-be-lethal toxins outside. And there’s someone still living inside who can also conveniently show her the super-secret safe room with all the books describing the silo’s true history.