I’m a little late getting to this book, but I think I can be forgiven seeing as how this installment of Hugh Howey’s dystopian series – set in the desert wastes of what used to be Colorado – came out more than eight years after I reviewed the first one. (To be fair, Howey’s been a little busy writing other fiction and also having his Silo trilogy adapted into a wildly-popular TV series.)
Don’t worry if you haven’t re-read the first installment in the series recently. Howey does an excellent job of bringing everyone up to speed. For a quick-and-dirty (or sandy, har) recap: Book 1 ended with the Axelrod brothers Rob, Conner, and Palmer, finally getting proof that their long-lost father actually survived his trip east across No Man’s Land. Said proof arrived in the form of their ten-year-old half-sister Violet, who was raised by their father in the holding pens of Agyl, the mining town that’s the source of a constant booming noise and an endless rain of sand.
Someone in Agyl is also responsible for bombing the great wall of Springston, burying a huge chunk of the city and killing hundreds. In retaliation, Vic – the celebrated big sister of the Axelrod family – stole a bomb meant for another part of the city and killed thousands.
The chapters jump between two viewpoints: the wastes where the sand-divers scrape together a living, and the people of Agyl. It might have been a little heavy-handed if Agyl had been represented by the alcoholic and wrathful Brock, or anyone else involved in bombing Springston. Instead we see Agyl through the eyes of Brock’s daughter. Anya’s been surrounded by some pretty horrendous attitudes towards the people from the West her entire life, so she doesn’t flinch when the immigrant prisoners in the mining camp are referred to as “vermin”. But she’s also got enough empathy to bring candy for the younger prisoners, or to be struck breathless at what she finds out her classmate Jonah has been doing to, well, not really make the prisoners’ lives easier, but at least make it harder for people to be shitty to them.
Most of that empathy goes away once something happens to upend her life and she finds a convenient target to blame. She’s lost pretty much everything except her father, and she’s resourceful as all get-out, so it doesn’t take much for her to follow him on a secretive mission that’s somehow tied up in his job, doing work he’s never been able to share with her.
“Where are you going?”
“West,” her father said. “I have to finish what I started.”
Meanwhile the Axelrod family is spending surprisingly little time thinking about the city to the east of No Man’s Land. It’s actually not accurate to say that there’s only two viewpoints in this story, because each member of the family has a wildly different experience and outlook on life in the desert. Middle child Connor is living in the shadow of his famous big sister and father, and now his older brother. He’s trying to figure out if he wants a calm, comfortable (ish) life with his girlfriend, or a life of fame and danger as a successful sand-diver. Oh, and he’s also dealing with having a new sister who’s very existence proves that his father had an entire family in the years after he left his wife and children behind.
Oldest sibling Palmer would be happy to bask in the adulation of being the sand-diver who made it all the way down to the buried city of Danvar. Unfortunately his new fame means every gang in the area is trying to recruit him, and gang life means parties and permanent scar-tattoos and the possibility of dying in a gang war. He’s also got the same issues that Connor does with his new half-sister Violet…all of which disappear when he realizes how much his father has trained Violet as a sand-diver, and how completely fearless she is. About everything.
And then there’s Rob. Too young for his mother to let him be a diver, but not too young to learn everything there is to know about the sand-diving technology that everyone seems to take for granted. As the youngest sibling, he’s the only one who never knew their father. So it’s ironic that he’s the one who’s “contacted” (kidnapped) by several mysterious sand-divers who accuse him of stealing the dive-boots his father left him. Rob pretty much spends the rest of the book obsessively trying to track down his attackers.
And every single character has the habit of making terrible decisions. At the spur of the moment. All the damn time. Going where they’ve been told not to. Talking to who they shouldn’t be seen with. Giving out information that could be really dangerous without thinking about who might hear them. Taking their underage impressionable little sister to a gang party, Palmer. (Seriously, Palmer, what were you thinking?) It would be annoying, except if feels very real. You’ve got mostly underage characters who already live in a future where death is just a hazard of the job (any job, really), and now large amounts of people are dying for the crime of (checks notes) living on the wrong side of the desert? By all means, stowaway on a dangerous mission, go to the gang party, set off on a quest to get your father’s boots back, why the hell not?
Considering that the book starts with citywide murder, it’s not surprising that this is a bit darker than the first one. It’s not just a war going on here, it’s a generational conflict. There’s dehumanization going on all the time (“vermin”, “animals”, “those people”), and a total failure to try to reason with the other side, or to even try to understand their motives. Attacked by saboteurs? Time to escalate. Your own weapon was used to cause an unimaginable tragedy? Obviously the only solution is more tragedy. And the longer the conflict goes on, the easier it gets to wish for the other side to just…go away.
“If I had a way of ending them all, I would,” Anya said. “Just to put a stop to this madness. To keep any of it from ever happening again.”
Aside from Anya and the Axelrod family, the biggest star of this book is the sand-diving technology. Howey immerses the reader in deep-sea diving terminology for when divers are exploring buried cities (and all the nail-biting peril that comes from running low on batteries, which believe it or not is even worse than running out of air), and how the technology allows catamaran-like sarfers to skim over and around the dunes. Rob however isn’t content with just using the technology to swim or sail. His scenes always have something fascinating and cinematic going on: dunes being blasted out of the way, buried objects rising to the surface in a column of sand, mysterious figures leaving the scene by dropping soundlessly below the surface, structures that can remain standing as long as the battery power holds. And of course all the ways the technology can be used as a weapon. People die in this book, a lot of them, fast if they’re lucky, slow if someone’s feeling particularly cruel.
The fact that the TV series “Silo” is doing so well gives me hope that maybe we can get a TV or movie adaptation for the Sand series too. I’m also hopeful that we’ll get more books. The end of this one is left wide open for a sequel, and I’d like to hear more about the history of the Axelrod family (Rose needs a bigger role than “Person Who Says ‘Don’t Do The Fun Thing'”, and there are some hints that a lot of what Connor, Palmer, and Rob have been told about their father is completely wrong.) And you definitely need to keep reading this book after the Afterward; I can’t think of another example of a book that actually has an end-credits scene.