What had once been rafters holding up a roof were now floor joists in Palmer’s house. Someone else’s house stood below theirs, long abandoned and unclaimed. Soon, his own home would be someone’s basement and this a sand-filled cellar. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell.
My Kindle copy of Sand by Hugh Howey had a series of footnotes linked to a glossary in the end of the book. I didn’t need to go back to the definitions more than once; the meanings were fairly self-evident, and it’s a short list: thirteen different words for “sand”. The book takes place in a city in a world-sized desert, surrounded by sand, on top of sand, and slowly being buried. The wind blows constantly from east to west, bringing more sand every day to the point where every part of the city-dweller’s lives is saturated with some kind of it or another: sand in clothing, sand that sifts through windows, sand that collects in the corners of the eyes, sand poured out of a boot. Wells have to be cleared of sand in an endless bucket-line, new homes continuously being built as the old ones are buried. And when sand inevitably gets in your mouth, instead of wasting precious water to spit it out, you swallow it. Constantly. Bleak stuff, but the author makes the details of the story endlessly fascinating.
Probably the most interesting part of the book involves the main livelihood of the city: sand diving. Howey doesn’t spend a lot of time on how the technology works, but basically special battery-powered force generators allow divers to move through the sand like water, plunging down into the dunes to recover long buried technology and artifacts (all of which will be familiar to the reader; it’s not giving too much away to say you’ll figure out the world’s name almost immediately). The force generators can also be used by the divers to move the sand around them, so you’ll have instances of temporary stone-sand (better for running across the surface), columns of sand shooting skyward (to bring artifacts to the surface quickly), and talented show-offs squeezing a ball of sand down to the point where it becomes a glass marble. To make things just a little more scary than deep-sea diving, if the dive-suit’s battery power fails the sand instantly becomes immovable, which could mean either being crushed under the weight of the earth above, or hanging frozen until the air runs out.
Movement was life in a way no lungful of air could match. If you could move, you could get to the surface and win a breath. A full lung and an empty cell were what nightmares were made of. This gave a diver time to die and space to do it in.
Like Howey’s earlier works, Sand was originally published in five installments. He’s gotten a lot better at pacing though, so there weren’t any instances of the characters running through an internal monologue where they cover the same ground they went over two chapters ago. He has a tendency to let his characters get a little too introspective, but I only found one or two places where this caused the story to grind to a halt (I had the idea at one point that this was supposed to mimic some kind of cinematic slow-motion, but I think this would have worked better on the screen than on the page).
Fortunately Howey has a flair for creating likable characters who actually have interesting things to say. Everyone has to deal with the same hopeless setting, but they all have their own
ways of dealing with it, and their own agendas (even if everyone’s main goal can be translated to “I’ve got to get out of here.”). He’s also good at letting you see the characters from someone else’s point of view (Rose and Vic, in particular), and portraying them as cold and unlikable, until you get to see from their point of view to see how they got that way in the first place. I thought Vic’s backstory was a tad predictable (you’ll have figured out most of it in her first chapter), but she has a refreshing lack of self-pity that cancels out some of the cliche.
Howey treats the story itself in the exact same way he treats his characters; the events are laid out like a mystery, and you think you know what the questions are. But the focus
changes constantly, right up to the last few chapters, so you’re never quite sure where things are going to move to next. The ending is mostly satisfying, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Looking through his bibliography, I can see that Howey is comfortable with letting his sagas go on for quite a few installments. I’m really hoping he has a few more chapters left to tell with this one.