Microreview [book]: Ignorance is Strength, edited by John Joseph Adams, Christine Yant, and Hugh Howey

This is is science fiction shining a light on the world around us. The heart of these stories is in the lives lived through the adversity of a failing society.

Six years ago John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey edited the ambitious Apocalypse Triptych, three anthologies taking readers into stories set before, during, and after the apocalypse in their relative anthologies. It was a spectacular reading experience. Now, with Christine Yant this triptych of editors has an intensely (and sometimes uncomfortably) timely set of anthologies following the same model, focused on the idea of dystopia.

Ignorance is Strength is the first volume of the Dystopia Triptych, borrows its name from George Orwell, and is damned uncomfortable reading. This isn't prescient science fiction, this is is science fiction shining a light on the world around us. It feels particularly American, but the United States is in the midst of a dystopian fall and the best of these stories come across as oh too real. This isn't an anthology of despair, however.  These heart of these stories is in the lives lived through the adversity of a failing society - though everything fails in a different way.

One especially poignant story is "The Truth About the Boy", by Adam Troy-Castro - which has powerful echoes of the response to the elementary school shooting at Newton, Connecticut and the vile denials by some that the shooting even happened and the claims that those children were actors. Adam Troy-Castro takes that idea farther with active campaigns and harassment against the parents of such murdered children, though perhaps he also reflects reality.

Many of those same themes are worked with in Merc Fenn Wolfmoor's anthology closing story "Trust in the Law, For the Law Trusts in You" - which is similar only to a point. Wolfmoor's story takes the (likely) idea that the United States will do nothing to actually curb school shootings or to address gun violence in any meaningful manner but instead will introduce virtual reality to school because maybe there can't be a school shooting if there is no in person school. That's a nightmare idea on the surface, but Wolfmoor extends that idea further and it's a chilling tale, though at least for me Troy-Castro's story is the more effective one.

My initial focus on the two school shooting related stories and the different descents that brings to America is not reflective of the rest of the anthology, at least in terms of story content. Seanan McGuire's "Opt-In" tackles the social economics of human organ harvesting and the effects of poverty on the desperation to earn enough money to take care of one's family when there are functionally no legal options. There's a slight distinction, but I'm a little surprised this isn't a Mira Grant story but then it doesn't veer into the horror that Seanan McGuire does when writing as Mira Grant. As with the best of McGuire's stories, "Opt-In" is a punch in the gut.

Other stories work with the prison economy, employment, artificial intelligence, the future of learning, climate change, and all the ways we can fuck up our world and our society and just make things worse. Not every story works perfectly and I fully recognize stories that don't work as well for me (Violet Allen's "Mister Dawn, How Can You Be So Cruel?", for example) might well be the favorites of other readers. The best stories for me are the ones that punch me right in the heart, so Adam Troy-Castro and Seanan McGuire earn those honors as well as stories by Tobias Buckell, Darcie Little Badger, and Karin Lowachee. When Ignorance is Strength is humming, there is nothing better.

Since this is a triptych of anthologies with linked stories, I'm afraid of where some of these stories will go in Burn the Ashes and deeper into the heart of the despair of dystopia. The best of the stories here are so searing that taking the next step is a frightening proposition. I can't wait.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 I'm a sucker for dystopian stories. +1 That Adam Troy-Castro story was soooo good (and uncomfortable)

Penalties: -1 There are always stories which don't land. -1 One story only tenuously fit the theme (it fit, but aliens)

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 - well worth your time and attention

Reference: Adams, John Joseph, Christine Yant, and Hugh Howey. Ignorance is Strength [Adamant Press]

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Microreview [book]: Beacon 23, by Hugh Howey

An excellent spacemance!

Howey, Hugh. Beacon 23. Broad Reach Publishing: 2015.

Buy the complete novel here (I also recommend the audio-book).

“Spacemance (n): a romance tale cloaked in a robust veneer of space opera.”

Can an ex-jarhead learn to love? I’d say the answer to that, a la Avatar, is a resounding “yes”, and Hugh Howey agrees based on the content of Beacon 23. And more importantly, he crafts a story that works both as romance and as space opera (with hundreds of millions of lives on the line, no less).

I only picked this up to read/review because of my fondness for several, if not quite all, of Howey’s other books, particularly Wool. That is to say, if someone pitched me a “The Notebook…but in space, and without the whole forgetting who the guy is thing!”, I don’t think I’d really have been sold. But Howey works considerable magic into this tale, which might well be his most poetically written yet. It’s an elegant mix of crass interiority and beautiful turns of descriptive phrase, painful honesty about (and from) the unlikely hero and tremendously empathetic passages that one can hardly read without growing a little teary-eyed.

If we’re being honest, I blubbered a bit myself here and there during the story, and was forcefully struck by the beauty of certain passages, and by the powerful recurring metaphor of the space beacon-as-lighthouse, and the mysterious painting showing either a wise person resigned to a terrible fate or a fool with no clue about what is coming. Needless to say, the main character is revealed to be both the wise man and the fool, both worthy of love and desperately in need of it.

But here’s the best aspect of this spacemance: the being both worthy of and in need of love character trait/flaw turns out to be the very quality the Other is trying to find, and the only thing that can, perhaps, bring an end to the cycle of interspecies warfare. To quote another Hugh(ie), it’s the power of love!

I’m sure all that sounds cheesy, but remember how beautifully Howey crafts the story and you’ll begin to understand why it’s such a success. He’s created one of his most compelling characters yet, and arguably his most beautiful and emotionally evocative story. Fortunately or unfortunately, the story is also complete (like the first Matrix movie was complete), and can’t really accommodate a sequel (yes, all you Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions fans, I’m saying what you think I’m saying: those movies were as unnecessary as they were crapitudinous).

In conclusion, if you like beautifully written romantic stories set in space, then it’s safe to say Beacon 23 is for you!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for raising the beauty of his writing to a new level, +1 for creating one of his best characters yet

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Space + romance = where do I sign up?”

[‘That’s a pretty low score for such an enthusiastic review, isn’t it?’ Answer: ‘no.’]










Zhaoyun has been sniffling through many a spacemance since joining Nerds of a Feather as a regular contributor in 2013.

Microreview [book]: I, Zombie, by Hugh Howey

Like Warm Bodies but without the Funny

Buy it here.

 

Howey, Hugh. I, Zombie. Broad Reach Publishing, 2012.

Don't like exceedingly visceral descriptions of death by zombie? Then perhaps you should give this book a miss. I decided to listen to the audio version rather than read this, thinking the vignette style would be perfect for my bit-at-a-time-while-making-dinner (etc.) listening practices, and I'm still not sure whether I was right and the audio format is best suited to the story/structure, or I did the book a disservice and would've liked it (even) more if I'd just read it like a normal person.

Howey presents us with quite a gory series of encounters between zombies and their (mostly) hapless victims, but with a twist that separates this tale from the vast majority of zombie stories out there: it's a zombie-eye perspective. That's right, we see the world filtered through their hunger for braaaains (and all the viscera, as it turns out). Yet that's not all—we are also treated to the horrified observations, via internal monologue, of the people these zombies used to be, aghast at what their bodies are doing.

If I had to choose one song that best characterizes the strange situation these people-yet-zombies are in, it's definitely Metallica's "One" (the know the 'one', right? haha!). That's because they're definitely locked in, *almost* entirely unable to influence their zombie bodies' behavior and certainly powerless to resist the hunger for other humans. This is a curious coincidence for me personally, as the next book I will review here at Nerds of a Feather is Scalzi's "Lock In", about a very different and rather more optimistic version of locked-in syndrome.

Strange as it may sound to say, this might be, despite the gore, Howey's most beautifully written book (so far). Some of the descriptions of what each zombie is doing (and what each former person thinks of these actions) are exquisite, not in the florid, yanking-on-the-heartstrings melodramatic way but with the staccato beauty of Hemingway. And parts of it, where Howey suggests the new reality these people experience being locked inside zombies might not quite be as final and irrevocable as they think, have deliciously chilling implications for human nature: if you were bitten, and then felt a very powerful urge to chomp on the hapless idiot standing next to you, of course the most appealing interpretation of the messy result would be that you had no choice, that you were powerless next to that mighty hunger...but what if, instead of being truly powerless, it was simply very difficult to resist the compulsion to snack on your neighbor—and you chose not to fight it? Howey may be hinting, here, that some of us might experience a rather smoother transition to zombiehood than we might want to believe.

Despite all that recommends it, I ultimately couldn't connect with this particular story (or format) quite as well as Howey's more straightforward sci fi adventure stories like Wool or Sand (both of which we've reviewed here). Perhaps that is because of my slavish desire for a mostly sympathetic or at least tough as nails protagonist with whom I can (in my dreams!) identify, a feature that is certainly missing from this vignette-style panorama of zombiedom. Or perhaps I should've read this rather than listened to it (the endless descriptions of evisceration by teeth did get to me, I'd wager, more by listening to another human being narrating them than they would if I could just scan the page and potentially skip over the gore). Whatever the reason, for this reviewer, at least, I, Zombie, while intriguing and certainly worth reading (listening to!), can't measure up to Howey's best work.

 The Math

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for reanimating the zombie genre with an interesting if horrifying speculation on what would happen to people whose bodies are zombified; +1 for the hauntingly beautiful descriptions

Penalties: -1 for the vignette approach (though, admittedly, I can't really think of a better method to tell this sort of story, as any one zombie would have a difficult time sustaining reader/listener interest as a traditional protagonist)

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable (if gory!) experience, but not without its flaws"

[We use a bell-curve scoring system in which very high or low scores are exceedingly rare, meaning a 7/10, while not earth-shattering, is quite a good score: see here for details.]

Brought to you by Zhaoyun, zompire aficionado and NoaF jedi knight (or at least Paduan apprentice, though in the interests of full disclosure, I've never even been to Padua!) since 2013.

Microreview [book]: Sand, by Hugh Howey

Wool for Scuba Diving Enthusiasts!

Howey, Hugh. Sand.  Broad Reach Publishing, 2014.

Buy the e-book omnibus (when did that word stop meaning just 'bus', anyway?) edition here.

You know when you're diving, and as you sink slowly down, you feel the pressure start to build, and build, until even just 25 meters down or so, you feel a glimmer of understanding of the essential fragility of human life? Well (Hugh Howey asks), what if you could do the same thing in sand?

Meet the eponymous story. The decidedly post-apocalyptic (probably nuclear holocaust in the distant-ish past?) setting of Colorado is covered in mighty dunes, drowned in a dry ocean of sand. The pre-cataclysm world is still reachable, though, to those who have mastered the art of sand-diving, which sounds more or less like scuba diving plus some sophisticated technological telekinesis (divers 'tell' the sand to move with a thought via their special diving suits, and voila! Move it does). And (especially metal) artifacts buried under hundreds of meters of sand are beyond price (which is just a fancy way of saying they're worth a lot) in the crappy new world, which is why divers risk running out of air mid-dive and asphyxiating in the middle of a sand dune, or otherwise expiring during the tremendously dangerous course of a dive.

If this is all sounding awesome...it is, let me assure you. Howey has spun together a mesmerizing tale here, one that contains many of the elements that made the Wool series so riveting. Beyond the obvious similarities like the setting in post-apocalyptic America, there is also the sense that the main characters, as in Wool, tremble on the edge of mind-blowing discoveries about the nature of their world, and might have the tools to remake that world to be more just and equitable. (Man, it's getting hard to say anything else without dropping a tornado of spoilers all over you, dear reader!)

Naturally, there are plenty of important differences to Howey's other work. First of all, this particular story is all about a family, one that has experienced especially harsh swings of fortune from giddy heights to dismal lows, and thus one that (to paraphrase Rick!) is like every other family, only more so. Each of the siblings, as well as certain other family members, seems critically important to this still inchoate quest to right the world's wrongs (though methodologically they take less a Gandhi so much as a (for those of you who know UHF!) "Gandhi 2" approach!), and I'm quite certain we'll be hearing more about each of them in the (by this reader, at least) eagerly anticipated sequels.

As sci fi goes, Sand feels more far-fetched than Wool, in the sense that I can totally believe a) someone might someday build (assuming they haven't already!) some huge silos to save people in the event of a cataclysm, and b) that said cataclysm might someday happen, whereas with Sand, it's harder to speculate what the scientific explanation could be for why the old world's covered in hundreds of meters of sand, or the pseudo-mystical mechanism of the sand-diving suits. Does this greater difficulty in suspending disbelief negatively impact one's enjoyment of the story? Not really—after all, sand-diving is such a cool idea I'm prepared to let Howey run with the concept, however wacky, and that's partly because (in this ever-more-complicated metaphor) Howey is such a good runner! Stylistically, that is, Howey only appears to be getting even better, with great dialogue, and sporadically wonderful descriptions (sometimes of a strange and lyrical beauty, like Tolkien pared down to Hemingway-level pithiness).

So, the bottom line: is Sand worth reading? Absolutely, for anyone who has the slightest interest in post-apocalyptic fiction (and quite a wide range of others, I would imagine!). Is Sand better than Wool? Not quite, but perhaps that's just the first bite is sweetest problem: if you find a great bakery (or wherever) and sink your teeth into a fantastic cake (or whatever), better than practically anything you've ever tasted in all of cake-dom, even if the next cake from that same place is just as good or even better, how can it really compete with that first endorphin rush?

The Math:

Objective assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for scintillating storytelling and an intriguing (if improbable-sounding) premise

Penalties: -1 for the improbable-soundingness of it all

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention"

[I know what you're thinking: "Only an 8?" But as you can see here, an 8 at Nerds of a Feather is like a 10/10 most other places; we only go to 9 for a tiny handful of mind-blowing masterpieces, and to 10 practically never (our 10 corresponds perfectly, in fact, to Spinal Tap's 11!]

The opinions elucidated herein are solely those of Zhaoyun, sf/f nerd-junkie extraordinaire and Opinionator at Nerds of a Feather since 2013, and should not be taken to reflect the views of Nerds of a Feather's megacorporation owner (everybody's got some (corporate)body, am I right?) or its fat-cat investors, or indeed anyone else in the entire world except those rare few with the same taste as yours truly.

Summer Reading List: Zhaoyun

Zhaoyun's Fantastic (with a few post-apocalyptic romps thrown in) Summer Reading List--"it's better than the ones you had in high school"

1. Reached by Ally Condie.

Which way Cassia will go—to Ky or Xander? If this is sounding a little like a soap opera/eerily similar to The Hunger Games trilogy idea of a tempestuous love triangle, well—it is. But it's still entertaining! It was in my "Time Permitting" category last summer, and time did not permit. But here's hoping time will graciously give permission this year!

2. Half a King by Joe Abercrombie 

(release date: July 2014)

  I, like Jemmy, am half in love with Abercrombie (clarification: we're in love with his work!), so this book coming out is one of the most exciting things happening this entire summer!

3. The Widow's House by Daniel Abraham (release date: Aug 2014)

W00t! I love this series, and I'll be fighting tooth and nail with my fellow-feathered Nerds for the privilege of reviewing this latest installment of Abraham's magisterial Dagger and Coin series.

4. Sand by Hugh Howey

Wool sold me on Howey, and his earlier work like Half Way Home wasn't too shabby either; now it's time to examine his latest offering, and see which direction he's going—backwards, or to new and ever more dizzying heights of brilliance!

 

5. Valour (sic!) by John Gwynne 

(U.S. release date: July 2014)

 His first book, Malice, was very nice indeed, and I have Dickens-level (i.e., "great", get it?) expectations for the sequel!

6. The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin (release date: Oct 2014)

The conclusion to Cronin's excellent (book one) or at least very very good (book two) vampire saga—who wouldn't jump at the chance to devour it? Technically, it's not really coming out this summer, not until the fall, but the way I see it, that just means I'm more likely actually to have time to sink my teeth into it (wink wink).

This list brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f aficionado and member of Nerds of a Feather Quorum of Twelve (ish) since early 2013.

Microreview [book]: Half Way Home, by Hugh Howey

Howey, Hugh. Half Way Home. 2010 (Print version: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).

Buy the e-book here (on sale, apparently!).

The Meat

The short version: it's good enough, but Wool it ain't! 

My comments below, which might seem rather harsh at times, should be interpreted in light of the fact that I think the world of Wool and the subsequent books in that series; I wonder what I might have thought of this, apparently Howey's first effort, had I not had my expectations ratcheted up into the stratosphere by reading Wool first and expecting the same level of brilliance here. On the other hand, must we remain eternally chained by chronology, and be forever barred from unfavorably comparing, say, Picasso's Blue Period with his later work because it somehow isn't fair to judge an artist by earlier, more tentative efforts—will only a later masterpiece do?

But wait! Perhaps we should question the entire notion that the career of an artist necessarily follows a shaky/tentative early work->mature/brilliant later work trajectory? Isaac Asimov, somewhere in the Foundation series, had his mouthpiece emphasize the fact that (he believes) scientists are only really brilliant, only capable of exploding existing paradigms and so forth, when they're in their twenties; after that, creativity plummets, and scientists tend to settle down into more conventional patterns of thought. Might that not be equally true of literary artists?

And we should probably distinguish between two different types of quality, while we're at it: stylistic/writing quality versus the quality of ideas a given work presents. Elsewhere I tried to make the case that a writer's first work is likely to be very high in the latter, ideational category, especially when contrasted with sequels set in the same world or following the same characters. But as for the former, a first book might not be particularly well-written, since in this technical sense, at least, writers (or painters, etc.) often have plenty of room to improve over the course of their careers.

So why do we read books/look at paintings/watch movies? There are doubtless many reasons, but I at least give more weight to the content/ideas of a given work than its technical perfection. I'm not trying to deny there can be plenty of pleasure in a well-crafted but essentially vapid story (I enjoy Michael Bay movies: Q.E.D.!), or that ideas by themselves are somehow more entrancing than ideas when packaged in slick action scenes or what have you (I like the breathtakingly beautiful first eight minutes or so of Melancholia a lot more than the equally philosophically fascinating but less visually stunning rest of the movie, because I like pretty things!). I only mean to say that, on balance, ideas are (or should be?) more important than technical wizardry.

Since it was his first book, we might expect Half Way Home to be somewhat inferior in writing style and so forth to Howey's later works like Wool, and sure enough, it is—the dialogue is a bit less snappy, the descriptions less vivid/emotive. But great ideas can cover all manner of slight imperfections like that. Trouble is, I'm not sure the ideas at the center of the story are great enough to do so; they certainly aren't *as* great as those behind the Silo saga.

That said, the story is certainly engaging, and plenty interesting. It concerns one possible (if, I would say, rather improbable) model for human colonization of other worlds, when such colonization is under the purview of an entity eerily similar to the villain placing 13th on the AFI's all-time list. One can detect a glimpse or two of Howey's brilliant 'What if...' approach to science fiction (brought to glorious fruition in Wool) here, as many of the parameters of the story are fascinating. But the characters, particularly the first-person narrator, don't have quite the vitality of our Wool-en friends, and their trials and tribulations are consequently less emotionally engaging. Moreover, I found it quite difficult to swallow the idea that some humans would willingly ally themselves with "Colony" (the AI) after seeing such stark evidence of what it was capable of (think Shia LaBoeuf's Eagle Eye, not the much better Asimov story on which it is extremely loosely based), even though it's an interesting thought experiment.

Does all this mean that you should skip this and go straight to the Silo saga? Not at all—you should do what I say, not what I did, and read this one first, *then* graduate to the main course in Wool.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for conjuring up an intriguing thought experiment about human colonization

Penalties: -1 for not managing anything like the polished style (or, more importantly, the brilliant ideas at the heart) of Wool

  

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

[Remember that a seven from NOAF is practically the equivalent of a 10/10 from many of the more effusive review sites or reviewers; see here for more information on our scoring system.]

Brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f book and movie aficionado and main cast member of Nerds of a Feather since early 2013.

AiIP: The Value Proposition

I'm going to open somewhat traditionally, with two small notes:

First: There are a lot of links in this. Generally, I use a fair amount to links (as most blogs do) as reference or to cite something- however, for this post, I highly recommend you click most or all of them, should the topic of modern publishing interest you.

Second: I am borrowing/plagiarizing a term from Chuck Wendig: Author-Publisher. I feel this encompasses much more than self-publisher, even if it is splitting an awfully fine hair. To whit, the author runs the business of writing and also the business of publishing.

With those out of the way, let's move on, shall we?

Ahem.

In my last post in this space, I examined if self-publishing is really worth it. I wondered if that post was worth it, relevant or if anyone cares.

Turns out, they do (remember when I said to click links? Click that one).

Hugh Howey, as is his wont, finds yet another way to emphasize self-publishing is the way of the future and if you choose any other way you are an idiot. This time, it comes via ostensibly reliable data, and hard numbers proving the aforementioned point as well as ZOMG THASSALOTTA CASH!

Obviously Hugh has done alright for himself, and obviously he and I disagree on several points, and this is one of them. As I say in those linked posts, the fact that you can make money as an author-publisher is news to zero people. Not people working on books, dreaming of making it. Not people who have finished books and are submitting them madly to agents and publishing houses. Not people who have published books through those houses, not the people who work for those houses, not my mom, no one is surprised by this.

One day, my writing will allow me to do this.

So this is where I get off Howey's bizarre train of self-confirmation. That author earnings page was sent to me by several (quite well intentioned) individuals with the basic subject of "this changes everything", when in fact, it changes nothing. It changes nothing because it is so fundamentally flawed and biased, it is actually worse then useless.

How do I mean that? Well, if one was so inclined, they could pick apart the 'data' piece by piece (click that on too), but I really want to tackle the one piece of completely misleading information is this: it is based on one day of Amazon's data. From this, he's extrapolated data to reach annual numbers.

I cannot begin to tell you how stupid this is, but I will try.

If you took my own data, on my best day (when I, you know, had a book on Amazon), I hit somewhere in the mid-80's of SF on Amazon. This translated to something like 30 books in one day, at a price of $4.99. At 70%, I made around $105. So if the snapshot was of that day, the 'data' would say I made almost $40,000 last year from being an author-publisher.

I did not, as significantly more days would suggest I made exactly $0.00 as an author-publisher.

Now, perhaps in the amalgamation, this is fine, as it's not analyzing DES Richard's data, but publishing as a whole. But overall, it still only serves to confirm a bias- not provide any useful, actual information.

In conclusion, I will reiterate what I have said before, and will say again, I'm sure: If you want to help the cause of author-publishers, show them how to be successful, emphasize quality in their works and champion the ones who do it right. Don't just confirm your own bias over and over again using flawed data.

-DESR

D.E.S. Richard is the author of 3024AD and various short stories. You can read (more) of his ramblings and musings on his blog, or follow him on Twitter. In addition to reading and writing, feel free to talk about food, drink, dress or any old movies.

Microreview [book]: Wool by Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey, Wool [Simon & Schuster, 2012]

The Meat

Wool, by Hugh Howey, is one of those rare, feel good stories in the history of self publishing. Beginning as a self-published short story in 2011, "Wool" was originally released to little fanfare. Slowly but surely, word of mouth spread, and readers and reviewers demanded more. Howey released subsequent sections serially, taking reader feedback into account, and grew his self-published short story into the New York Times Bestseller it is today. The book has been published internationally, and the film rights have even been optioned by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian. Even before the book was published by Simon & Schuster, it had already sold more than 400,000 e-books and had been optioned by Hollywood. What a year for a self-published author!  

I must admit, I came late to the party. I would have never even read Wool had a good friend not passed along her copy to me. But boy am I glad she did. Wool is the most memorable story I have read all year, and perhaps the best work of post-apocalyptic science fiction I have read in at least the past few years. 

The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, one in which the outside air is too toxic and contaminated to breath. Humanity lives in a huge Silo, one that descends 144 levels deep into the earth. Naturally, the residents of the Silo have built their own traditions, culture, and even religion predicated on the fact that they are the only ones in existence. Yet the culture of the Silo, we find, appears to be almost wholly statist and stratified, with each group serving its particular functions. The machinists, miners, and hydroponic farmers operate mostly in the lower third of the Silo, deep underground. The information technology group is located in the Silo's heart, while the Mayor, the Sheriff, and the official leaders work at the very top. The Silo is wholly self-sufficient, producing what it needs and strictly controlling the population to ensure group survival. Only with someone's death, can a new life be brought into this harshly controlled world.

Any mention of the world outside the Silo is wholly forbidden. And stating a desire to go outside is a death sentence. In a ceremony poignant with meaning, those convicted of wanting to go outside are given their wish: the are forced to leave the Silo and serve as cleaners. They don a bulky protective suit, and use industrial-grade wool cloth to clean off the outside sensors. But unfortunately for the cleaners, the Silo is unable to create suits that can get the cleaners back into the Silo alive. This is humanity's future dystopia. A bleak one indeed.

Wool presents a central mystery, one from which the story's wheels start spinning. Despite the fact that cleaning is a death sentence, each and every cleaner nonetheless methodically cleans off the sensors before succumbing to the toxic environment outside. Why, with this assured death sentence, do they do their jobs without fail? Why not resist, or refuse?

The story takes shape from this central mystery. And the answer takes the reader deep within the Silo, into the depths of its working machinery, into the intriguing existence of IT in a world that doesn't seem like it should support such technology, and into the far reaches of its political and cultural life. Of course, to get deep within the Silo, the reader must travel down vast, spiraling staircases, as the Silo made room for no elevators. At first, this struck me as odd and rubbed me the wrong way. But midway through the book, it becomes obvious as to why the Silo's floor plans include no elevators. The difficulty of traveling through the Silo is what makes the adventure so much more interesting, and the cultural and political differences between sections of the Silo more believable.

Toward the end, the book becomes somewhat predictable, and the ending leaves a bit to be desired. Nonetheless, Howey presents likable characters making the most of (or sometimes going crazy in) their dystopic, difficult-to-imagine environment. In the process, he tells what might otherwise be seen as a tale of the morality of immorality, and the difficulty of removing the wool once it has been pulled over one's eyes.

I dare not say more about the plot. Doing so would ruin the excitement that this book provides.  Read, and discover for yourself.

Highly Recommended.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Penalties: -1 for always making me think, "why are there no elevators in this silo"?

Bonuses: +1 for making me realize, midway through, why there are no elevators...

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 "Standout in its category"