Wool: The Inspiration for Silo Seasons One and Two―A Heart-Pounding Thriller of Survival and Betrayal in a Dystopian World of Darkness (Silo, 1) Paperback – October 20, 2020

This was a reread for me. I read it ages ago when it first came out but this time around I wanted to read it with the characters faces from the Apple TV series Silo in my mind - and I loved it even more! This book is more timely than ever. In an afterward, Howey writes, "The idea of needing to see with my own eyes was a foundational idea for Wool and the books to follow. The wallscreens [in Wool] are our television, our web browsers, our search engines, our newspapers, the local news, our cellphones. we are bombarded constantly by talking heads telling us what the world is like."Premise: In this dystopian future, the remnants of humanity have been living in a massive, self-sustaining, underground silo with no contact with the outside world.Plot: (This is going to be the most drab plot summary ever but I really don't want to give anything away to anyone who hasn't read this or seen the series yet.) The society within the silo is strictly governed by rules, ensuring order and survival, but also suppressing curiosity and dissent. As the story unfolds, individuals begin to question the truth about their circumstances, leading to dangerous revelations and conflicts.Wool (and the Silo series) examines themes of control, freedom, and the power of knowledge in a confined world.It's a definite must read and I love the ways that the series tweaked the book while still being near 99% true to the source material!

After a short dearth of books I didn't like, it seems I've hit a few that I do. I liked "Wool" quite a lot. I thought the story was a good piece of human drama and adventure set up in an environment that would otherwise seem difficult to have an adventure in. I'm not generally fond of killing POV characters early in a story, but this one made it work pretty well. I found myself caring about the characters and their plight, which is good.That said, there are some basic "oh please" world-building and physical problems with this story. (Looking for physical problems and world-building hiccups is a big part of what I read for.)The idea of people dying in order to clean a sensor mast struck me as frivolous on first read. A basic facet of engineering is to design maintainability into an apparatus. Engineers are industrious that way. If there are a couple thousand people within yards of the device and it's expected to endure a hostile environment there will have been a design feature included to take advantage of those people to maintain it which doesn't include killing them --think periscope or windshield wipers. I came to forgive this flaw because the story around it was well enough written and I later decided that it could be overlooked given deeper background in the world. The design of the silo, including this sensor mast, is deliberately cruel.I came to question the silo stairway a couple times. In some points, it's presented as a straight-shot top to bottom, but sometimes presented as if the shaft could be discontinuous: the author speaks at one point that someone considering jumping off the stairway doesn't necessarily have a straight shot to the bottom and must pick where they jump off with care, which makes no sense if it's a constant pitch spiral all the way down. It's unclear at points if the landings on the stairway span the entire shaft or if they're a short dock on one side or the other of it. Also, the author makes big use of porters carrying stuff up and down the stairs and I had to stop and ask "where the hell are the bucket pulleys??" One of those big singular features of "humanity" is ingenuity applied to avoid labor (we don't just build devices to be cruel or because we like playing with gadgets)... big open shaft with lots of commerce going up and down, any real population would rebel if prohibited from using pulley systems. Again, this can be explained away by the inherent cruelty in the silo's design and governance and there may have been a brief notation at one point to explain this away, but I do not recall it.Still, there are also some basic physical problems in the story surrounding the silo. First, the Down Deep at the bottom of the silo is sometimes referred to as "the cold of the down deep" and so on. In reality, the Down Deep would be the warmest part of the silo. The Earth does get warmer as you go deeper into it. This is the basis of geothermal power. I find it hard to imagine people worrying about freezing in an environment that is always 60 degrees F and hotter. This is forgivable because it's minor. Second, it is never very clear exactly how tall the floors of the silo are, but it is implied by how long it takes to walk them that they are taller than the floors in a skyscraper... with an open shaft this deep into the ground, there would be a significant difference in pressure of the atmosphere from top to bottom. This could easily play into how hard it is for people to climb it, and so it is forgivable. On the flip-side, however, the main character must swim several hundred feet downward through flooded silo levels at one point --but when she must hurry back from this (or die of suffocation), she never confronts pressure narcosis even though she starts with a breathing apparatus.Within this swimming into the Deep Down section, it's implied that water inhibits rusting and that equipment in flooded sections are preserved by the presence of water. This is not true: dissolved gases rust metals in water and dissolved ions, acids and such, can corrode them.There is one additional fairly big physical problem that figures into the plotting of the story. The character uses a sheet of "heat tape" to confront and survive what amounts to an oven. Tape can't fundamentally be useful in this situation. There is still some argument about what makes tape "sticky," but it's generally agreed that it's a combination of viscosity of the substance on the tape and gas bubbles trapped in that substance. Viscosity decreases with increasing temperature and gas expands. The combination of these two factors against the intensity of fire means that the tape will stop sticking pretty much immediately since tape-like stickiness is not compatible with heat. And so, her heat shield of tape strips would just fall apart. Again, this problem is fairly minor, but it can't be tape... it would have to be an epoxy or silcone-like glue, something that reacts to polymerize and maintain its bonding, and even these must be specially designed to resist heat. And, surviving fire, you want something with a high heat capacity: a water shield or a ceramic barrier and combined with something shiny with differential reflectance to radiate away the infrared.I very much enjoyed a section where a character is essentially in the process of rediscovering radio and convincingly using electronic components. The one potential hiccup here is that a radio you can carry does not emit radiation that penetrates the Earth, concrete or steel construction. Some of these waves only penetrate a short distance through the air, even. It would therefore require something beyond just radiowaves or microwaves for the characters to be picking up broadcasts originating from elsewhere. I will not say the "elsewhere" where these signals came from, but suffice it to say, they had to have come through the Earth, which is not realistic. I consider this minor because there are other potential unelucidated elements of the infrastructure that might be used to explain it away.Despite my outlining these problems, and I do outline them because nobody else probably will, they weren't enough to stop me from reading... which says quite a lot about how well the story was written. I have acquired "Shift" and "Dust" both. To give context to my responses here; I acquired "Dust" first and read the first few chapters... when I realized that was the continuation of a story I hadn't read, I went back looking for the early parts because my first impressions of "Dust" were just that good. I was almost immediately guaranteed to read "Shift."

If you are reading this, then the title of my review has done it's job & I am glad for it. Having cut my teeth on the works of Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Bradbury, Heinlein, etc, it has been a bit of a challenge to find more modern authors who have the ability to tell a story rich in character development, gripping story, imaginative, yet believable.So, since book reviews are meant to guide the next possible reader, let me cut to the chase first, and then I will go to work on the review of the books:******* BUY THIS SERIES NOW! *******Do not waste your time trying the sample, just go ahead and buy all of the works in the WOOL collection (six, as of this writing) right now.If you do not buy them all, and you find yourself without an internet connection and you just finished reading one of the books and you know there are others available you will be extremely annoyed, distracted, pi$$ed off, etc till you get the next one & start reading it.Having read hundreds of books, many in the SciFi genre, but also many biographies, and historical works (european & british history especially) I was absolutely blown away by the Wool books. To be completely honest, I almost put the book down maybe 30 pages into it. I was on vacation on an amazing little island off the coast of North Carolina, no cars, no distractions except miles of beaches & ocean waves when I searched on my Kindle for some Science Fiction to read over the 15 days I was away. Since I often read SciFi books that are based well in the future, take place off-earth, etc, I was not really prepared for the way Wool opened. It was dark, depressing, and not what I thought I wanted on my vacation with the sun shining and the seagulls singing and the waves crashing on the sand. But I stuck with it, and that is why I am here today, writing this.First of all lets backup for a second and talk about the name of the book. WOOL. You wear it (sometimes). But it has numerous other uses, including, apparently, as the name of a book. I didn't know what to even make of it. I mean look at most of the titles under SciFi, & you get the space war sagas, the alien invasions, the boy-meets-space travel stories, etc.... But WOOL?? I couldnt fathom it would be a book that would interest me for very long, and so I again reveal how mistaken I can be. Important Lesson learned? : Dont judge a book by it's cover, nor by it's NAME.One of the many great yet very subtle parts of this work is when you actually connect the name WOOL with the line in the story that reveals the connection. It's not too far into book 1 and you know what, you might not even catch it, and it might not mean much to you- but it did, for some reason, to me.It brought home to me that Hugh Howey had put me in a place that seemed at first to be so incomprehensible, but later came to be seen as a very possible, plausible place not so far removed as to be unimaginable, yet still so staggering in it's implications.If WOOL had only been the short, single work of book 1, I would have been upset that it wasnt taken further, or approached it's potential. In fact, I didn't know there were more books at first and I really was upset. I thought "WOW- SO MUCH POTENTIAL, this was an amazing story, but look where it ended!?" And then I checked back on Amazon and saw the remaining books and grabbed them all (hence my earlier suggestion to do the same).Without spoiling the story for those of you who have not yet started, I do want to say that this is one of the most fascinating, smart, stop-for-a-second-and-say- `Oh my god!' reads I have ever picked up.I absolutely loved the way I first tried to figure out where this was taking place. Was it on earth? Somewhere else? When? How did it come to be...? Did any of that matter...? As I read on, and parts of those questions were answered I was very very pleased with the depth of the story, and so glad that there wasn't a flaky, thin, all-is-revealed at once to put it all together for me. It came together carefully, methodically, and at just the right pace.The fact that the characters in WOOL are just people, with no super abilities, paranormal talents, etc, makes them all the more important to the way you see them move through the story.While all of the books were gripping to me, I particularly enjoyed the flashbacks to see how it all came about. Without spoiling this particular part, I will just say that it was extremely well done and has some fantastic but subtle connections between the characters and story that could easily be missed. A great example of this: A sister of a congressman only gets mentioned briefly and almost as an aside in passing during a brief conversation, yet later you realize the implications of the circumstances and again have another "WOW" moment.Yes, I realize that was pretty vague, but trust me on it. If you miss it, my apologies, if you get it, no other comment is required..;)Well, this is by far the longest review I have ever written and I still feel like it is not even close to being as compelling and passionate as I had envisioned it when I decided it had to be done. But in closing just a couple of things to say: No doubt, this is a book I will read many times over, and as another reviewer summed it up so well, I only wish I could read it again for the first time.Will it become a movie? I don't know, but I hope so, but ONLY if it can be done well (an example of what it should NOT be like: Steven King 'The Stand' book vs. movie. The movie was an insult to the book in my opinion). The Scott brothers certainly have the ability to do it right. I actually care less about the movie possibilities than the fact that the deal may help Mr. Howey devote more time to writing! We will see.... Regardless of the outcome of the motion picture issue, I hope that Mr. Howey keeps this series going for a long time. I do understand that talented authors, artists, actors, musicians, etc need to move on and create new works and new characters and new stories, but the selfish part of me hopes this story will keep intriguing us and challenging us for years to come in new installments and characters and situations. The foundation exists in as solid a form as possible.In my opinion this is already a classic work of fiction, here to stay, and Mr. Howey should feel extremely pleased to be in this stratosphere of talent that comes along so rarely. These books will be talked about in classrooms, in living rooms, family rooms, bookstores, etc for a long time to come and I really hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.