I heard the other day that Ridley Scott will soon begin casting for Wool, the movie based on Hugh Howey’s epic post-apocalyptic novel. That was my cue to finally read the book.
I’m happy to say the book stands up to a lot of the hype I’ve been hearing. Other than maybe needing a tighter edit, and a slightly lighter hand with visual description (and only in a few places) it’s a pretty solid book, with a really fascinating premise.
Wool takes place in a huge underground tower, called the silo by the residents. Well over 100 levels deep, it’s connected by a central staircase, and no elevators, which makes travel between the various floors time-consuming and difficult.
Travel outside the silo is impossible, as the toxic air kills almost instantly, and the science teams are frustratingly unable to develop a suit that can keep out the poisonous atmosphere for more than a few minutes. Humanity’s only connections to the outside are huge video screens on the top level that show the barren hills and a few ruined buildings in the distance.
The toxic dust will slowly cover the camera lenses, so convicted lawbreakers are set outside in flimsy suits to clean the cameras. Which they always do. In their last few minutes of life they’ll always clean the cameras, and no one knows why.
Eventually the reader will pick up on the threads of some kind of conspiracy. E-mails are almost impossibly expensive to send, so people send notes on (almost as expensive) paper to talk with friends and family on different levels, making communication between different areas of the silo slow and unreliable. The IT department uses more energy than any other level, and wields just as much power as the mayor, and this is just how things are.
People are sent outside to do “cleaning” for simply saying they’d like to go outside, or wish they could go outside, or even saying how great it would be to live someplace else other than the silo. These are capital offenses, and people die for it every year, but everyone’s so grateful because if they didn’t, who would clean the cameras, and how could they see outside?
Seeing outside is somehow incredibly important. There’s a celebration every time the cameras are cleaned, even if the people on the lower levels don’t understand what the fuss is about, or why someone has to die for it.
Howey’s world is filled with secrets, but it’s surprisingly homelike too. Some levels have hydroponic gardens, porters cheerfully run packages up and down the levels, and a huge marketplace takes over almost an entire level with booths and crafts and an amphitheater. The details sprinkled throughout are fascinating. Howey’s painted a well-researched picture of exactly what humanity would look like if they were stuck in an underground silo that they can never leave, and he makes the entire idea surprisingly plausible.
The book was originally self-published as several different novellas, until its popularity soared and the novellas were all put together in one hardback last year. I believe if I’d read them as separate novellas I wouldn’t have had any problem with the editing. As one giant hardback, though, the story starts to bog down in a few places.
Characters seem to get introspective about the same subjects over and over (Lukas in IT is particularly prone to it) and this slows down the pacing of the story. If I’d had big gaps of time in between reading the novellas I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, but when you read it in one big chunk you start to wonder why the characters are going on about this same mental problem again.
Howey is extremely skilled with visual descriptions. I had no problem picturing the silo in my head. The various levels, the huge stairwell, the grungy Mechanical area, the pristine and imposing IT department; every detail is very clearly defined, and I wouldn’t want him to change a word.
The visual descriptions that happen in the middle of a conversation, though, are sometimes a little off-putting. At one point a character is trying to get one of the Mechanical workers to eat while he figures out a problem. Every other sentence is something about him eating a spoonful, or blowing on it, or chewing it, or messing with it. It’s distracting, because a little of that kind of description goes a long way. In some places, especially scenes of violence or action, the story needs to move a lot faster, and I think if he’d sacrificed one or two lines of description things would have flowed a little better.
These are pretty nit-picky complaints, but that’s the only kind of complaint I have about this book. Other books suffer in premise or style or subject matter, but Wool is very strong on all those points. I’m looking forward to seeing what Ridley Scott does with the movie.