Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Machine Learning
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/23/1975
WEBSITE: http://www.hughhowey.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2012093228 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2012093228 |
| HEADING: | Howey, Hugh |
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| 001 | 9038076 |
| 005 | 20171027135034.0 |
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| 010 | __ |a no2012093228 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca09246244 |
| 040 | __ |a IChamL |b eng |e rda |c IChamL |d DLC |d IEN |d UPB |d DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1975-06-23 |2 edtf |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3608.O9566 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Howey, Hugh |
| 370 | __ |e Jupiter (Fla.) |e West Jefferson (N.C.) |e Charleston (S.C.) |e Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) |e Indian Trail (N.C.) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Speculative fiction |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 378 | __ |q Hugh Crocker |
| 670 | __ |a Wool omnibus, c2012: |b t.p. (Hugh Howey) |
| 670 | __ |a From author’s website, hughhowey.com, Feb. 26, 2013 |b (“Hugh C. Howey, born in 1975, lives in Jupiter, Florida.”) |
| 670 | __ |a Internet speculative fiction database 14 January 2015 |b (Hugh Howey; Hugh C. Howey; born 1975) |
| 670 | __ |a US public records index, via FamilySearch, 14 January 2015 |b (Hugh Crocker Howey; born 23 June 1975; has lived in West Jefferson, N.C.; Charleston, S.C.; Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Indian Trail, N.C.) |
| 953 | __ |b rg14 |
PERSONAL
Born June 23, 1975, in Charlotte, NC; son of Hamp Howey and Gay Murrill: married Amber Lyda (a psychologist).
EDUCATION:ECPI University, graduate, 1994; attended College of Charleston.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has also worked as a yacht captain, roofer, computer repairman, and audio technician.
WRITINGS
Also the author of the nonfiction series, “Wayfinding.” Also author of numerous short stories.
Film rights to Wool were sold to 20th Century Fox.
SIDELIGHTS
Science fiction writer Hugh Howey is part of a select group of authors who have turned internet self-publishing into a lucrative career. Howey, who worked variously as a yacht captain and a computer repairman, decided to try his hand at writing. He posted his first long story, “Wool,”–a post-apocalyptic tale set in the future when the few thousand remaining humans live underground in a deep silo–on Amazon in 2011 for 99 cents. Within several months, that story that he had dashed off in three weeks, had sold a thousand copies and his new fan base was begging for more. He released a sequel, and it sold three thousand copies in its first month. Two more installments followed, with total sales of 10,000 copies, and when he released the the final installment, the price had climbed to $2.99, and the omnibus volume of all installments sold for $5.99. In that month alone he sold 23,000 copies of all the editions.
Howe decided to quit his day job at a bookstore. Literary agents were contacting him, mainstream publishers were courting him, and film rights were sold, which pushed his sales even higher to the point where he was making $120,000 a month. Howe and his agent proved to be smart negotiators, as well. Writing in the Charlotte Observer Online, Pam Kelly noted in this regard: “Howey’s self-published sci-fi hit, which took off as an e-book, demonstrates how digital technology continues to transform publishing. But his particular story has made headlines for another reason: When he parlayed his success on Amazon into a mid-six figure print deal with Simon & Schuster, he negotiated to keep the e-book rights.” Similarly, Wall Street Journal Online writer Alexandra Alter observed: “Mr. Howey comes across as a charming, self-deprecating goofball (he posted a video of himself doing ballet on his lawn on YouTube after he signed his publishing deal), but he’s proven to be a savage negotiator and slick marketer.”
Wool
Howey gathered his novella-length installments together for two volumes of the “Silo Trilogy,” Wool and Shift, and added a third and concluding original novel, Dust. The author introduces his future world in Wool, with the few survivors of a cataclysm living underground in a 144-story silo. Any couple that wants to have a child must enter a lottery and tickets are given out only when someone dies. Any citizen who breaks the law is sent above ground to die from breathing the toxic air. Huge screens provide the only information for this remnant of humanity; the screens depict horrific images of the ruined landscape above, reminding inhabitants that there is no life outside of the silo. Slowly, however, some of the residents begin to suspect that the leaders may be lying to them, not only about conditions above ground, but also how the world came to be destroyed. Juliette is one of these, and soon she begins to discover that there are dozens of silos all buried close to each other.
In a NPR.org interview with Petra Mayer, Howey remarked on his intentions with Wool: “I really wanted the silo to represent our planet. We live on a giant ball of rock and water, and it’s so big that it feels like the resources are limitless, but they aren’t. We transmute raw materials into waste, and that will have to end at some point. We also do a terrible job of getting along with our neighbors, even though we’re all in this together. So the silo is a microcosm of our world. The story is about real people and real problems. I think that’s why it resonates with readers the way it does.”
“Wool isn’t about the anarchy of a world without order; it tells of the sacrifices that might need to be made to keep it intact,” noted John Bailey in Australia’s Sun-Herald. Bailey added: “The rate at which Wool throws up new puzzles, moral conundrums and reversals of fortune is dazzling and, while the bunker setting might suggest an air of claustrophobia, the plot itself is a constant space of expansion.
Central to its success is Howey’s keen sense of character.” Further praise came from Washington Post Online reviewer Keith Donohue, who noted: “It’s easy to see how exuberant word of mouth spread so quickly on the Internet for Wool. The characters are well drawn, with a rousing protagonist and antagonist, and the plot races forward without resorting to melodrama. Most of all, the mood is rightly claustrophobic and, at times, genuinely terrifying — particularly with the very real threat of global warming looming. … Wool is the kind of sci-fi novel you can give to those who love the genre and those who never read the stuff.” London Guardian Online writer Alison Flood similarly commented: “It’s easy to see why Wool captured readers so quickly. Give Howey slightly more time to write the next one, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.” A Wired.com critic was also impressed, observing: “Howey’s strength is in his characters. They are distinct and yet familiar in their desires. They love, even when it isn’t allowed, they explore even within the confines of the silo and they create. So much happens in Wool that little more can be said about the characters without giving much away. Let’s just say that this is storytelling based upon good characters placed in difficult situations and not simply on world-building or laser guns, and that makes for brilliant science fiction.”
Shift and Dust
The series continues with the prequel, Shift, which explains how the world of the silos were created following a nuclear holocaust. Fifty silos were built, and one of these has occupants who are awakened once a century from a cryogenic sleep to serve a half-year shift overlooking the other forty-nine silos. Bailey, again writing in the Sun-Herald, noted: “[T]his prequel charts the top-down power struggles of those who created the world of its predecessor. Beginning in a near- future not much different from our own day, it flits back and forth across three centuries in which humankind is placed under tight control and all memories of its previous state are stripped away. … Wool‘s readers will remain engaged throughout.” Writing in the Express Online, Jon Coates had praise for Shift, noting: “The prequel feels claustrophobic and constrictive as humanity is forced underground and force-fed medication to forget the destruction inflicted on friends and loved ones. … More and more layers of the dystopian world are unveiled, enticingly paving the way for the sequel Dust.”
That final installment, Dust, returns to the time of Wool, and picks up Juliette’s story, as she looks for a way for humanity to emerge from the silos. “What we get in Dust is a non-stop, cohesive story line of ‘go, go, go!’ and I’m happy to say that it was my absolute favorite of the trilogy,” commented Rebecca Skane in the online Portsmouth Review. Writing in Entertainment Weekly Online, Kristen Baldwin also had praise, commenting: “Even though [Howety’s] heroine suffers painful losses along the way, her tale of survival still has a powerful lift.”
Sand, Beacon 23, and Machine Learning
Howey again published a series of e-book novellas that were collected in an omnibus volume, Sand, which posits a future America covered in desert. The novel details one family’s struggle for survival in this dessicated landscape. Writing in Bookbag Website, Sam Tyler commented: “It is hard to overestimate how impressive Howey’s world building skills are. Sand is another brilliantly realised world that feels both fantastical and realistic at once.” SFFWorld Website contributor N.W. White also had praise, noting: “The story is magnificent. Go. Buy it. Read it. … This is a great novel.”
Beacon 23 is set in the twenty-third century, and lighthouse keepers have moved their work to outer space with a series of beacons that enable ships to travel at many times the speed of light. These beacons are built to last and should never fail. But one such beacon does after it is hacked, and it causes catastrophe. Now the nameless hero must repair the beacon before a cruise ship carrying 5,000 passengers is destroyed. Online NewsOK contributor Ken Raymond dubbest this a “quick, easy read, especially since most of the events involve only one character.” Blizzard Watch Website reviewer Michael Mitchell also had a high assessment of the novel, commenting: “The genius of Beacon 23 is that it takes a setting separated by swaths of time and space and makes the story so intimately personal that there’s never a disconnect between the protagonist’s experiences and the experiences a modern-day reader might have.”
Howey gathers a score of stories in his Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted of this collection, “Howey’s writing is taut and immersive, and his characters’ perspectives will fascinate, no matter how inhuman they are.” Similarly, a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded: “A thoroughly engaging collection with a dark sense of humor but its finger always on the pulse of genuine human concerns.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Age (Melbourne, Australia), November 2, 2013, Owen Richardson, review of Dust, p. 28.
Bookmarks, May-June, 2013, review of Wool, p. 45.
Bookseller, December 21, 2012, review of Wool, p. 28.
Collected Magazine, November, 2013, Lisa Salter, review of Dust, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories.
Observer (London, England), August 18, 2013, Jessica Holland, review of Shift, p. 37.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of Machine Learning, p. 110.
Reading Time, August, 2013, Pam Harvey, review of Wool, P. 35.
Sun-Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), December 30, 2012, John Bailey, review of Wool, p. 10; May 5, 2013, John Bailey, review of Shift, p. 13.
Xpress Reviews, June 6, 2014, JoAnn Funderburk, review of Shift.
ONLINE
Blizzard Watch, https://blizzardwatch.com/ (June 21, 2016), Michael Mitchell, review of Beacon 23.
BookBag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (May 14, 2018), Sam Tyler, review of Sand.
Charlotte Observer Online, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/ (May 19, 2013), Pam Kelley, review of Wool.
Entertainment Weekly Online, http://ew.com/ (August 30, 2013), Kristen Baldwin, review of Dust.
Express Online, https://www.express.co.uk/ (May 12, 2013), Jon Coates, review of Shift.
Fantasty Book Review, http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/ (May 14, 2018), Daniel Cann, review of Wool.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (June 13, 2014), James Lovegrove, review of Sand.
Games Radar, https://www.gamesradar.com/ (January 18, 2013), review of Wool.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 10, 2013), Alison Flood, review of Wool.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (June 5, 2018), J.E. Fishman, “Hugh Howey and the Bestseller Myth.”
Hugh Howey website, http://www.hughhowey.com (June 5, 2018).
Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (January 20, 2013), David Barnett, review of Wool.
Luna Station Quarterly, http://lunastationquarterly.com/ (September 1, 2016), KC Maguire, review of Beacon 23.
NewsOK, http://newsok.com/ (April 23, 2016), Ken Raymond, review of Beacon 23.
Newton Review of Books, http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/ (November 14, 2013), Folly Gleeson, review of Dust.
NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/ (August 31, 2013), Petra Mayer, author interview.
Peace Council, http://peacecouncil.net/ (May 14, 2018), Frank Cetera, review of Wool.
Pop Verse, http://pop-verse.com/ (September 5, 2014), Megan Leigh, review of Wool.
Portsmouth Review, https://portsmouthreview.com/ (July 4, 2015), Rebecca Skane, review of Dust.
Self Publishing Review, https://www.selfpublishingreview.com/ (October 7, 2014), James Grimsby, “Self-Publishing Success Story: Hugh Howey.”
Serious Reading, https://seriousreading.com/ (May 14, 2018), review of Beacon 23.
SFFWorld, https://www.sffworld.com/ (June 15, 2014), N.E. White, review of Sand.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (March 1, 2013), Tammy Oler, review of Wool.
Tele Read, http://teleread.com/ (August 20, 2013), Joanna Cabot, review of Dust.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (March 14, 2013), Alexandra Alter, review of Wool.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com (March 11, 2013), review of Wool.
Wired.com, https://www.wired.com/ (March 29, 2012), review of Wool.
Born in 1975, I fell in love with reading and with sailing at a young age. I had two dreams in life: to write a novel and to sail around the world. In 2009, I finally completed my first novel. My seventh published work, WOOL, became an international bestseller and has been translated into nearly 40 languages. My career as a writer has taken me all around the world; I’ve met amazing readers everywhere I go, and I’ve seen some extraordinary places. Now I’m embarking on a journey to complete my second dream, that of sailing around the world. This website is a history of both of those dreams.
ABOUT WAYFINDER
Sailing vessel Wayfinder is a 50 foot catamaran built in South Africa by St. Francis Marine. She was Cruising World’s 2006 Cruising Cat of the Year. After a long search and after looking at hundreds of boats, I fell in love with the design of the St. Francis 50. I commissioned hull #19 and oversaw her construction in St. Francis Bay. Wayfinder will be my home for the next decade or so, and I hope will carry me clear around the world.
ABOUT WAYFINDING
Wayfinding is the ancient art of navigating by paying attention to the natural signs all around us. Ancient wayfinders used the stars, the wind, the currents, the migration of birds, and much more in order to settle the islands of the Pacific. I believe there are many lessons to be learned from these ancient navigators. For me, wayfinding has become a method of self-improvement by tuning in to the many hidden signs of our behavior, and using these signs to navigate to the better self that we aspire to be.
Self-Publishing Success Story: Hugh Howey
James Grimsby October 7, 2014 Features, Success Story
Hugh HoweyHugh Howey, an American writer, started out his career writing as a side-project to his day-job as a computer technician, as well as a yacht captain.
What books has he written?
His smash-hit series follows a range of characters in an uncertain future, living underground in silos because the outside world is toxic. The original series is broken up into nine books, but a deal was signed with Simon & Schuster to distribute the books in 2 omnibus editions plus Dust, the stand-alone conclusion to the series. Despite having made several publishing deals and agreeing to both film and comic book adaptations, he famously turned down a seven figure deal in favor of mid-six figure sum in order to retain e-book rights to the books, allowing them to be more freely distributed online, considering our current time to be one of the best times for self-publishing in history. The latest book
is a children’s book, Misty, The Proud Cloud.
Wool Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey
The Success Story
While finding some success in his novels and novellas, he gained massive success with the publishing of his short story Wool. An avid and creative writer, he quickly moved onto a new project as with previous work after publishing, until noticing that Wool – sold at only 99 cents on Amazon – was gaining ground and was already on its way to 1,000 copies sold by the end of its third month on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. He then made the decision to expand the series with several more short stories, and soon found international popularity as a result of his refined talent in the genre and an open attitude to his work, which has been directly attributed to a rise in self-publishing.
You can learn more about how he did it here at his AMA on Reddit
How many books has he sold?
It’s said Howey has sold over half a million books worldwide, and climbing.
Hugh Howey on Amazon
new deadlineIf you have written a great science fiction/fantasy novel like Hugh, why not enter our Full Moon Awards competition? Deadline Oct 15th!
If you would like a book review click here
Hugh Howey and the Bestseller Myth
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By J.E. Fishman
Hugh Howey, who grows more famous by the second, is a friend of mine. No, not a genuine friend. A Facebook friend.
Howey is having his moment right now, selling more than half a million copies of his novel, Wool, and being feted on at least two continents.
I read the Wool Omnibus after it became a phenomenon but before it achieved full phenomenon! status. Which is to say, before he was published in any nation by a Big Pub outfit and before the Wall Street Journal wrote an article admiring Howey’s business acumen.
Because Howey is a “friend” of mine and I’ve followed his work, I can say with confidence that the Journal’s assertion that Howey is “a slick marketer” — or at least the implication that this played any significant role in his success — is utter bunk, and I think he’d be the first to admit that.
The Journal also labels him a “savage negotiator.” This is closer to the truth, but it’s important to note that when it came time to negotiate with Big Pub, Howey was doing so from a position of strength, a position where perhaps one in 50,000 authors ever sits.
It’s worth making these distinctions because, inevitably, people have begun looking at Howey’s success as something instructive, something which struggling novelists can emulate and thereby make themselves bestsellers, too.
The reality, however, is this: Many novelists fail commercially while doing things a certain way, but those that become first-time bestsellers do many of those same things while managing to succeed for unique reasons — or no reason at all. The fact that agents and publishers often advise authors to emulate any given path to the bestseller list probably says more about all of our desire to find order in a disorderly world than anything else.
Consider the following advice, meted out to aspiring authors ad nauseam.
Write the best book you can write.
Writing a good book may be its own reward, but you could build a stairway to the moon with all the good books that never made a plug nickel for anyone. Wool is a good book, in my opinion, and a story that displays a great deal of originality. But the problem with the above advice is twofold.
First, if Howey is to be believed (and we have no reason to doubt him), he didn’t set out to write a book at all in this case. He wrote a short story, and that story became so popular that he decided to spin it into an entire novel.
Second, most self-published bestsellers I’ve read aren’t very good. Some of them, in fact, are quite bad — at least by the standards of mainstream critics or Big Pub. Therefore, Howey writing a good story does not affirm anything about the value of writing a good book as a strategy for creating a bestseller. Too many books have defied this law to give it any validity.
Fiction titles matter.
I don’t know what Howey thinks of his title. By the standards of Big Pub, it sucks. It’s not poetic, doesn’t pique one’s curiosity, and does nothing to communicate its genre to the prospective reader. This explains why Simon & Schuster tried to talk Howey out of using it. Of course, by then the book had established itself as a huge bestseller, giving the title invaluable brand recognition. Howey didn’t have to be a business genius to recognize the counter-productivity of a title change at that point. He does deserve credit for not allowing himself to get steamrolled by conventional Big Pub wisdom.
Get reviews.
The Journal makes a point of noting that Howey gave books away to book bloggers and Goodreads reviewers. This is a sensible strategy. It’s so sensible, in fact, that everyone does it. I’d venture to say that your average book blogger can stop accepting submissions tomorrow and have enough free books to keep her reading for the next hundred years. So the mere fact of sending free books around to bloggers, while a necessary marketing step, hardly predicts success.
He did receive some good reviews from websites — BoingBoing and Wired.com’s GeekDad among them — that seemed to give the book a boost. In contrast, many other novels have received similar treatment on well-trafficked websites without seeing any effect whatsoever on their sales.
It is possible that Howey did hit Goodreads at just the right time — just as that particular social network was going hyperbolic. There is some evidence that those who are active on any given social network just as it’s hitting warp speed can establish a name for themselves by being in that right place at that right time. There’s a word for being in the right place at the right time. The word is luck.
Have a platform or an impressive following on the social networks.
If nothing else, perhaps Howey’s success can drive a stake through the heart of the social media imperative that has, like the song of the Sirens, drawn so many novelists to misdirect their creative energy in utter futility.
Did Howey build his bestseller upon an impressive platform? No. The current numbers say a lot. Even after all his success, Howey has (as of 3/10/13) 6,067 Twitter followers where any number of authors you’ve never heard of (and never will) have tens or even hundreds of thousands. He has 2,941 Facebook friends and, so far as I can tell, no official author page. He has 1,268 friends on Goodreads.
If you care about this sort of thing, these numbers are nothing to write home about. Fortunately for Howey, they don’t matter nearly as much as we’ve been told.
A marketing platform may be essential for your average non-fiction author, but Howey proves how unnecessary it is for the novelist. Howey has something far more valuable than a stellar social network: paying readers.
Engage your fans.
Here Howey has done another admirable thing (besides writing a good book). To quote the Journal: “He hosted an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on the popular website Reddit, fielding users’ questions for more than 12 hours. He encouraged fan art and fan fiction set in the Wool universe; his readers have designed book covers and written their own novella-length takes on the story. He conscripted 30 of his most ardent fans to be ‘beta’ readers who edit early drafts of his books for free.”
The problem with this series of actions as a piece of advice, however, is that they suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem. I challenge the average unknown novelist to host a chat on Reddit, for example, and see whether he gets 12 minutes worth of questions, let alone 12 hours. Before you can profitably be nice to your fans (or conscript them), you actually need to have more than a few. In order to have fans, you need to have readers.
So, to review, Hugh Howey has done a couple of things right. For one, he wrote a good book. But many good books fail to become bestsellers and many bestsellers are not good books in the eyes of critics. Therefore, as a source of insights into bestsellerdom, this offers nothing tangible. He engages his fans, but until an author has fans there’s no one to engage. So that observation also remains unhelpful to the average novelist.
He’s also done a couple of things wrong (by the standards of what the experts tell us). He put a seemingly poor title on his book and he has not scaled on the social networks.
What Howey has most benefitted from is a large volume of reviews, which makes sense because he has sold lots of books — more than half a million. On Goodreads the Wool Omnibus has 12,726 ratings and 2,219 reviews. By contrast, however, John Grisham’s The Firm has nearly 20 times the ratings. Weirdly, it does have the exact same number of reviews (or it did when I checked on 3/10/13).
In these last numbers we can maybe get a glimpse into the mechanism of Howey’s success. It takes more effort to write a Goodreads review than it does to rate a book, and the batting average that Howey has for reviews is quite high. Which indicates, I think, that he’s forming an emotional connection with his readers.
Yet here we are back at the chicken-and-egg problem. No doubt you can fill entire libraries with authors whose work forms an emotional connection to readers. Unfortunately for these authors, more of them than you can count go undiscovered by the masses.
What, therefore, at the end of the day are we to make of Hugh Howey’s success? Perhaps we should make of it precisely what Howey himself does. He is charmingly honest about the serendipity that turned him into the No. 1 science fiction novelist in America. In a recent article for Kirkus, he begins, “I wonder if lottery winners get emails asking for advice on how to win the next one,” before noting, “I really do believe luck plays a large role.”
Last May on the Huffington Post he noted his film deal and his publishing deal in the U.K. (he didn’t have a U.S. publishing deal at that time) and gave the following explanation for his success: “All because of word of mouth. Because I happened to please you, and you told someone else, and they spread the word further.”
This is as close as we’ll ever come to knowing what makes a novel take off commercially. You can do everything right and fail. You can do everything wrong and succeed. Usually, as with Howey’s journey, you’ll get some things wrong while getting other things right.
But — and this is important — there is no formula, and there never was. Big Pub knows quite well how to profitably publish the 10th novel of a brand-name author, but they’re generally pretty hard-pressed to explain how the first bestseller came about.
Likewise, what works for one indie author doesn’t necessarily do squat for another. You can sit back and admire how your Facebook friend hit it big, and you can even root him on, but you can’t learn a thing from him about how to replicate that success.
Hugh Howey, to his enduring credit, knows that as well as anyone.
Follow J.E. Fishman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jefishman
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J.E. Fishman
Author of Primacy, Cadaver Blues, The Dark Pool and the Bomb Squad NYC series
QUOTE:
Howey's writing is taut and immersive, and his characters' perspectives will fascinate, no matter how inhuman they are.
Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories
Publishers Weekly.
264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p110+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories
Hugh Howey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 (352p) ISBN 978-1-328-76753-0
Bestseller Howey (the Silo trilogy) assembles 21 thoughtful science fiction and fantasy stories (two previously unpublished) that explore real and virtual worlds through human, alien, and artificial senses. Many of Howey's tales, such as the title story, "The Box," "Glitch," and "Second Suicide," are told from the points of view of nonhuman characters. "The Walk Up Nameless Ridge" and "Deep Blood Kettle" question human arrogance in alien circumstances. Unusual love affairs--a failed romance in "Promises of London" and a relationship between a human and an android in "The Automated Ones"--deliver old-fashioned emotional punches. Characters exploit virtual worlds in "The Plagiarist" and "Select Character." Fans of Howey's novel Wool will enjoy "In the Air," "In the Mountain," and "In the Woods," set in the same universe. Author's notes at the end of each story provide thoughtful background. Howey's writing is taut and immersive, and his characters' perspectives will fascinate, no matter how inhuman they are. Agent: Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 110+.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652629 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8e728cf8. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652629
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
QUOTE:
A thoroughly engaging collection with a dark sense of humor but its finger always on the pulse of genuine human concerns.
Howey, Hugh: MACHINE LEARNING
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Howey, Hugh MACHINE LEARNING Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $28.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-328-76753-0
Twenty-one new and previously published stories are gathered loosely by subgenre in this collection from sci-fi author Howey (Sand, 2017, etc.).The first four stories deal with alien places and cultures. "Second Suicide" stands out, with stereotypical alien invaders (they're even tentacled) that at first seem comical--but their unique struggle with mortality is quite serious. "Nothing Goes to Waste" packs a gruesome, concise punch, highlighting the sacrifices made for art and sport. In the second section, Artificial Intelligences, the most charming of the four stories, "Glitch," explores the moment when an arena battle-bot learns how not to fight. The next three stories are set in Howey's Silo universe, a post-apocalyptic world where select survivors repopulate the planet after a global purge. Though the stories reference characters from other Silo works, they stand alone well and proceed from the initial disaster to the tragic conclusion of the quest for justice (or revenge) of two people who saw their world end. The fantasy section includes "The Good God," a blackly humorous look at how evil might defeat good via spam overcommunication; it's all too timely in our era of fake news. Howey explores discrimination with "The Automated Ones" and its heart-rending sequel, "WHILE (u > i) i - -;" a bittersweet love story between a woman and an android. "Select Character" follows a housewife who plays her husband's video games out of boredom--but plays them her way, unlocking a more hopeful definition of victory. The last story, "Peace in Amber," is the most personal, incorporating Howey's own experiences of 9/11 while also paying homage to Slaughterhouse-Five. Each story is followed by insightful author's notes. A thoroughly engaging collection with a dark sense of humor but its finger always on the pulse of genuine human concerns.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Howey, Hugh: MACHINE LEARNING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572806/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d2ed10ad. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572806
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Hugh Howey: Wool
The Bookseller.
.5557 (Dec. 21, 2012): p28. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Bookseller Media Limited http://www.thebookseller.com
Full Text:
Hugh Howey
Wool
Arrow, 7.99 [pounds sterling], 25th, 9780099580485
Another self-published "phenomenon", it is a high concept novel set in a stark future, apparently. A dystopian tale with folk living in a giant underground silo full of rules. Break them and your punishment is to be allowed outside.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hugh Howey: Wool." The Bookseller, 21 Dec. 2012, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A314252092/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=fbf3a49c. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A314252092
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Wool
Hugh Howey
Bookmarks.
(May-June 2013): p45. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Bookmarks Publishing LLC http://www.bookmarksmagazine.com/
Full Text:
By Hugh Howey
Internet sensation Hugh Howey has published five installments of his best-selling ebook Wool. His postapocalyptic tale of confinement and hope is now available in print.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
THE STORY: When Earth becomes a toxic wasteland, its inhabitants are forced to retreat inside a deep silo. The survivors create lives for themselves that, under the circumstances, are more than could be expected. Still, the silo's draconian rules ensure that the only people who ever see the outside world are the cleaners and the lawbreakers (many of whom are guilty of nothing more than Orwellian thought crimes) who are sentenced to scrub the silo's exterior--and who are left to die when their task is complete. "There was this unspoken, deadly hope in every member of the silo," Howey writes of the inhabitants, including Holston and Jules, two of the story's protagonists. "A ridiculous, fantastical hope. That maybe not for them, but perhaps for their children, or their children's children, life on the outside would be possible once again."
Simon & Schuster. 528 pages. $26. ISBN: 9781476735115 boing boing ****
"This story is terrific. I was completely immersed, watching Howey slowly paint a picture of a society gone wrong through the eyes and discovery of some truly compelling characters." JASON WEISBERGER
Independent (UK) ****
"Hugh Howey's Wool ... is a proper futuristic dystopia in which the dead don't eat the living but rather harbour the secrets of what has gone before; secrets to be picked at and peeled away piece by piece to unveil the true horror of the world. ... With the film rights already sold to Ridley Scott, Howey's Wool is likely to be spoken about in the same breath as The Hunger Games and The Passage before long." DAVID BARNETT
Washington Post ****
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"The characters are well drawn, with a rousing protagonist and antagonist, and the plot races forward without resorting to melodrama. Most of all, the mood is rightly claustrophobic and, at times, genuinely terrifying." KEITH DONOHUE
Wired ****
"The old assumptions about indie books no longer apply; Wool clears away the grime of the past and reveals the new truth. Here is a non-traditional author who can stand proudly in the company of traditionally published writers." ERICK WECKS
Guardian (UK) ****
"It's easy to see why Wool captured readers so quickly. Give Howey slightly more time to write the next one, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with." ALISON FLOOD
Cleveland Plain Dealer ***
"In the end, it is difficult to know how to judge Wool. ... Fans of the post-apocalyptic genre will ... enjoy immersing themselves in a world that is both familiar and strange, and the plot's twists will keep readers turning the pages until the exciting climax." SAMUEL THOMAS
CRITICAL SUMMARY
Hugh Howey became an ebook sensation by self-publishing his story--and promptly selling hundreds of thousands of copies of Wool before considering a traditional publisher. Any comparisons (and they're out there, sadly) to the path that Fifty Shades of Grey took to the top of the best seller lists are patently absurd. Rather, Wool is a legitimate (read "old school") attempt at dystopia in the vein of Logan's Run or many of the grimy, trippy novels that came out of the science fiction New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s, replete with some of the verbal excesses of those books as well. That many Howey fans can't be wrong, and his postapocalyptic tour de force (and its subsequent installments--five in total, all under one cover) will have mainstream readers buzzing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Howey, Hugh. "Wool." Bookmarks, May-June 2013, p. 45. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A342179744/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6efd9501. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A342179744
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Howey, Hugh: Wool
Pam Harvey
Reading Time.
57.3 (Aug. 2013): p35. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Children's Book Council of Australia http://cbca.org.au/merchandiseOrdering/RTsubscribe.php
Full Text:
HOWEY, Hugh Wool 563pp ISBN 9781780891248 SCIS 1591716; Shift 569pp ISBN 9781780891224 SCIS 1607448 Century, 2013 $29.95 pbk
Wool (The Wool Omnibus) is a collection of several short stories melded into one long narrative. Sometime in the near future, people live in a silo, unable to go outside for fear of perishing in the toxic air. The silo has its own governance and the law is strict. Breaches can mean being sent to cleaning; that is, going outside to certain death. With the last sheriff suffering that very fate, Juliette from Mechanics is summoned to take on the onerous job of law enforcement. The silo, though, is becoming restless. The control IT has seems disproportionate to the rest of this highly segregated world. And the servers contain restricted information about the history of the silo, including that of regular uprisings. For her curiosity and her alliance with the old guard, Juliette is sent to cleaning and made to go outside where victims inexplicably clean the grimy outside windows of the silo before their suits succumb to the toxicity. Juliette, however, has had her suit modified and she survives, walking away without cleaning anything and over the hill where she discovers another silo. There seems to be only a single survivor amidst the dead bodies and Juliette works with him to make the silo more habitable. It is when she is able to radio contact her own silo that she realizes her people are at war. Lukas has discovered that there are 50 silos all buried within metres of each other, and that there are those that have known this always, communicating across the silos to try and keep them under control. When Juliette crosses the desolate landscape once more, she arrives as a hero to those who have managed to stay alive.
Shift (The Shift Omnibus) is the prequel to Wool. It is a mega-story of how the silos began and how they continue, from the manmade apocalyptic disaster to the crypto-frozen experts that reappear decades later to try and save the ailing silos. The story fluctuates between time periods, gradually building in character development and plot to the point where some characters from
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Wool appear.
This series of books began life as ebook short stories. The clamour for more from readers led to Howey compiling the stories into (so far) two omnibuses, with another scheduled for release later this year. The sci-fi world is complicated but mostly rigorous, and originally compelling. Each silo seems to have its own story, so the guess is that there will be more for fans. Recommended for readers of sci-fi. PH
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harvey, Pam. "Howey, Hugh: Wool." Reading Time, vol. 57, no. 3, 2013, p. 35. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A342467959/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=62875668. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A342467959
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Dust
Lisa Salter
Collected Magazine.
.11 (Nov. 2013): p28. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa http://www.slanza.org.nz/collected.html
Full Text:
DUST--BY HUGH HOWEY [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The final instalment of the series which started with Wool and was followed with Shift, the prequel that helped make sense of the world created in the first story, but left plenty to discover in "Dust".
The people live in a silo, they have lives, jobs and a very limited understanding of the world around them. Everything about their existence is controlled and while there doesn't seem much joy, there are families, community and a shared sense of purpose.
I loved this book and this series. I loved the imagination, creativity and the hope it shares about life and the living of it. I was lucky to meet Hugh Howey, the author, and he seemed a genuinely nice, regular guy. I can't imagine this story was just sitting in the author's imagination waiting to be written down. I'm very glad it was.
If you have not started on this literary journey I encourage you to take the first book Wool to the beach this summer, buy copies as gifts for all your reader friends and share this unique Sci-fi journey.
Recommended for senior students and any adult you know. Reviewed by Lisa Salter--Kaipara District Library Manager
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Salter, Lisa
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Salter, Lisa. "Dust." Collected Magazine, no. 11, 2013, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A356353456/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=440ab10d. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A356353456
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Howey, Hugh. Shift
JoAnn Funderburk
Xpress Reviews.
(June 6, 2014): From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews- first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Howey, Hugh. Shift. (Silo Saga, Bk. 2). 15 CDs. library ed. unabridged. 18% hrs. Brilliance Audio. 2014. ISBN 9781480567993. $64.97; 15 CDs. retail ed.; 2 MP3-CDs. retail ed.; digital download. F
Escaping a nuclear holocaust, thousands of hand-picked individuals from each state take refuge in 50 self-contained underground silos built to last more than 500 years. While the inhabitants of 49 of the silos live out their natural life spans, the occupants of Silo 1 are awakened from cryogenic sleep once a century to work a six-month shift overseeing the other 49 silos until the outside world is deemed safe for human habitation. Those who seek answers find that truth is elusive, and those who question the order are silenced. Narrator Tim Gerald Reynolds holds the listener's imagination ransom from beginning to end. Distinctly voiced and well characterized, his performance draws from an arsenal of pitches, volumes, and intonations, portraying the characters quite well.
Verdict A great purchase for fans of sf and time travel postapocalyptic fiction. JoAnn Funderburk, South Garland Branch Lib., TX
Funderburk, JoAnn
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Funderburk, JoAnn. "Howey, Hugh. Shift." Xpress Reviews, 6 June 2014. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A372957966/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=9fb47db8. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A372957966
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THE NEW REVIEW: Books:
PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Shift
Hugh Howey ARROW pounds 6.99
The Observer (London, England).
(Aug. 18, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p37. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Full Text:
Byline: Jessica Holland
What if the long-term survival of the human race depended on thousands of Americans being relocated to a vast underground city, with giant TV screens broadcasting a desolate landscape outside and no one allowed to leave?
That was the idea behind Wool, the series of short stories Howey began selling online for between 99 cents and $2.99 in 2011, and which overtook Game of Thrones last summer on Amazon's list of sci-fi bestsellers. Print and film deals followed, as did this prequel, made up of three interweaving stories sold cheaply by Howey through Kindle Direct Publishing and then packaged and printed as a full-length novel. (In the UK they were picked up by the same imprint behind Fifty Shades of Grey.
Wool's hero was Juliette, a freedom-fighting mechanic born a hundred storeys underground, and the strands of Shift's split narrative take place earlier, explaining how her world came to be. We meet a 23rd-century courier whose graffiti-spattered "silo" is simmering with civil war; a Georgia congressman in the near future; an abandoned schoolboy whose story ends where Juliette's begins; and Troy, who wakes up in 2110 without remembering who he is.
Sci-fi often gets a bad rep for privileging plot above all else, but here the charge sticks. Settings and characters are bland, particularly the women: we get a standard-issue femme fatale and two supportive and long-suffering wife figures. The plot itself offers some genuine surprises, but it's overcomplicated.
What succeeds is the dread-inspiring imagery at the trilogy's core (part three, Dust, is out in October). The pixelated screen that dominates Wool was inspired by Howey's own experience of watching TV news. In Shift there are characters who outrun their deaths by being cryogenically frozen, thawing out every 50 years to pop pills, watch videos, do some mind-numbing work and go back to sleep. "No one was truly awake," Troy reflects. "No one was truly alive."
Whether or not Howey believes in the details of his story, the anxiety, claustrophobia and
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lethargy he conjures are heartfelt and convincing. "You don't get the fire back in the box once you've unleashed it," he writes, and while the mixed metaphor might make some break out in hives, it's a sentiment that's hard to deny. When technology changes things, there's no going back.
Jessica Holland
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"THE NEW REVIEW: Books: PAPERBACK OF THE WEEK: Shift Hugh Howey ARROW
pounds 6.99." Observer [London, England], 18 Aug. 2013, p. 37. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A339959468/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=500ce167. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A339959468
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QUOTE:
Wool isn't about the anarchy of a world without order; it tells of the sacrifices that might need to be made to keep it intact.
he rate at which Wool throws up new puzzles, moral conundrums and reversals of fortune is dazzling and, while the bunker setting might suggest an air of claustrophobia, the plot itself is a constant space of expansion.
Central to its success is Howey's keen sense of character.
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Life gets deep and meaningful after the apocalypse
The Sun-Herald (Sydney, Australia).
(Dec. 30, 2012): News: p10. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. www.smh.com.au. Not available for re-distribution.
http://www.sunherald.com.au/
Full Text:
Byline: JOHN BAILEY
Wool Hugh Howey (Century, $29.95) Reviewed by John Bailey
In 2011, a then-unknown Hugh Howey self-published a short story named Wool for e-readers. Reviewers clamoured for more and, as the author penned further instalments that built upon his initial vision, his admirers grew in number. When the first Wool omnibus was bundled together and released as a stand-alone volume, it made The New York Times bestseller list on word-of- mouth alone.
That original novelette - the first chapter of the newly released collection - simply bristles with promise. The setting is a titanic silo stretching a mile into the earth in which the last members of humanity have been holed up for centuries. Outside, the planet has been ravaged by some biochemical plague but, unlike most post-apocalyptic stories, the emphasis here is on the fully functioning community that has managed to live on.
Wool isn't about the anarchy of a world without order; it tells of the sacrifices that might need to be made to keep it intact.
Virtually the only contact the silo's inhabitants have with anything beyond their walls is via the cameras mounted above its roof to transmit images of the crumbled landscape. Anyone found guilty of a capital offence is exiled into the waste, and their last action before succumbing to the atmosphere will be to scrub the accumulating grime from the mounted lenses.
The philosophical question that begins proceedings focuses on why the condemned always say they won't carry out the cleaning, and why they invariably do. But in keeping with the piecemeal writing process that formed the book, Howey never leaves you hanging for long.
The rate at which Wool throws up new puzzles, moral conundrums and reversals of fortune is dazzling and, while the bunker setting might suggest an air of claustrophobia, the plot itself is a constant space of expansion.
Central to its success is Howey's keen sense of character. Every chapter delivers emotionally
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complex personalities deeply embedded in an intricately stratified social system, and the manoeuvrings of each has subtle impact on the rest.
It's science fiction with a deeply humanist bent; how many science-fiction novels devote as much time to a shy romance between two people in their 60s as anything else? When a villain is introduced - the head of the IT department, no less - he's much more than a mere convention.
Written in a warm style that never attempts to get too clever, this is the kind of terrific read that's both respectful towards and transcendent of its own genre.
Director Ridley Scott has already bought the film rights, and it's safe to say Howey's own future is looking blue-skied and bright.
JOHN BAILEY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Life gets deep and meaningful after the apocalypse." Sun-Herald [Sydney, Australia], 30 Dec.
2012, p. 10. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A313351557 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=391a928b. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A313351557
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QUOTE:
this prequel charts the top-down power struggles of those who created the world of its predecessor. Beginning in a near- future not much different from our own day, it flits back and forth across three centuries in which humankind is placed under tight control and all memories of its previous state are stripped away.
Wool's readers will remain engaged throughout,
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How panicking rulers force humanity underground
The Sun-Herald (Sydney, Australia).
(May 5, 2013): News: p13. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. www.smh.com.au. Not available for re-distribution.
http://www.sunherald.com.au/
Full Text:
Byline: John Bailey
FICTION Shift Hugh Howey (Century, $29.95)
Hugh Howey's Wool was one of 2012's most refreshing publishing successes - a self-released e-book that attracted millions of fans and a lucrative three-book deal with Random House.
It deserved the hype. Its tale of a complex, finely tuned society living in a titanic underground silo is bursting with surprises and a sense of endless possibility, along with characters that grip your attention from the outset.
Shift is the second in Howey's Silo Trilogy and something of Wool's opposite. Where the first volume follows a host of workaday folks unearthing sinister mysteries, this prequel charts the top-down power struggles of those who created the world of its predecessor. Beginning in a near- future not much different from our own day, it flits back and forth across three centuries in which humankind is placed under tight control and all memories of its previous state are stripped away.
At Wool's centre are a series of resourceful women who unlock the secrets of the system in which they find themselves. Shift, conversely, focuses on authoritarian men in a constant state of panic.
When not ordering drone strikes or developing technology to destroy nations, they're sobbing uncontrollably on the bathroom floor or wolfing down handfuls of anti-anxiety pills. Unlike the atmosphere of expansion that characterised the first entry in the series, Shift is uncomfortably claustrophobic, both physically and psychologically, as its main players deliberately shut off those parts of themselves that doubt, fear and question.
It's an uncomfortable read, if only because its various leads are increasingly unsympathetic. The trilogy so far is less interested in individuals than in the systems that create them, and by tackling the governmental, military and scientific structures that shape so much of our world, Howey shows how relatively innocent people can be led into making the most terrible decisions simply because of their position.
There's not a lot of joy here, but as usual Howey includes the occasional moment that is all too
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human for its ordinariness - the congressman who plays card games on his work computer, or the guard who watches his security monitors like daytime dramas. The book's final third does suffer that typical prequel problem as we approach a point with which we are already familiar, but at least one of Wool's major characters is given a substantial backstory as a result.
Shift could be read on its own but this probably won't lead to much satisfaction.
Wool's readers will remain engaged throughout, but will leave hungry for the final volume that brings the various established players into direct contact.
John Bailey
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How panicking rulers force humanity underground." Sun-Herald [Sydney, Australia], 5 May
2013, p. 13. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A328694336 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4c92e706. Accessed 8 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A328694336
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FICTION
The Age (Melbourne, Australia).
(Nov. 2, 2013): Lifestyle: p28. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited. www.theage.com.au. Not available for re-distribution.
http://www.theage.com.au/
Full Text:
Byline: Review Owen Richardson DUST
By Hugh Howey
Century, $29.95
REVIEWOWEN RICHARDSON
It is only two years since Hugh Howey self-published Wool, the first instalments of this sci-fi sequence, as an e-book, which then went on to appear in paper form and give birth to the trilogy of which Dust is the final volume.
Howey's set-up has an immediate vividness. He posits a future world in which the survivors of some cataclysm have taken refuge in an underground silo, self-sufficient and hundreds of levels deep: outside the atmosphere is poisonous and malefactors are sent there as a fatal punishment. One major crime is speculating about the world beyond the silo and only a few know that there are other cities just like theirs. The past likewise is shrouded and much of it has achieved the status of only half-believed myth.
Howey's aesthetic is one of machines and overalls and the smell of oil, while the multi-strand narrative moves from character to character, level to level, silo to silo. It's both panoramic and claustrophobic. The opening scene describes the heroine Juliette digging a tunnel from Silo 18 to the one adjacent whose city has broken down and flooded, leaving only a handful of people there alive.
The breach soon becomes social as well as physical, and the fragile system of control monitored from SiloI starts to break down: Juliette also learns more about how her society is run. And if other silos can be reached, there may be a chance the world above can be reclaimed.
Review Owen Richardson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"FICTION." Age [Melbourne, Australia], 2 Nov. 2013, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A347607865
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QUOTE:
t’s easy to see how exuberant word of mouth spread so quickly on the Internet for “Wool.” The characters are well drawn, with a rousing protagonist and antagonist, and the plot races forward without resorting to melodrama. Most of all, the mood is rightly claustrophobic and, at times, genuinely terrifying — particularly with the very real threat of global warming looming. It’s not a perfect novel, and, at times, the method of its construction sticks out like a crooked seam. But “Wool” is the kind of sci-fi novel you can give to those who love the genre and those who never read the stuff.
Book review: ‘Wool,’ by Hugh Howey
By Keith Donohue March 11, 2013
Even if it were just a run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic novel about a society forced to live underground, “Wool” would still be quite a tale. In the summer of 2011, a 36-year-old jack-of-all-trades named Hugh Howey self-published a short story on the Web. It was discovered by fans of dystopian sci-fi adventure, and they quickly spread the word. Rapidly rising sales led him to continue the story in four additional installments.
Well before any print edition rolled off a press, “Wool” had sold more than 400,000 e-books and was optioned by Hollywood. But what sets it apart from hundreds of thousands of self-published e-books is that it’s a good and compelling story, and well told. It seems as if there should be a marketing trick responsible or some blatant appeal to prurient interest, but this is no “Fifty Shades of Wool.” It’s the real deal.
Simon and Schuster caught the wave and is publishing a five-volume omnibus — in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions — for us Luddites. By now, if you haven’t read (or at least heard of) “Wool,” you’re hopelessly old-fashioned and oddly well-suited to its rather traditional storytelling charms.
The action takes place inside a huge silo, 144 stories deep, dug into the Earth, where people must live because the atmosphere is toxic and the land is ruined. The small community is stratified as well, with the farmers and mechanicals in the lower third, the information-technology folks in the heart of the structure and the professional class in the upper level. The silo relies on highly regulated statism. The working classes wear color-coded uniforms. Goods and services are exchanged by chits. People are confined by a rigid set of rules on everything from the number of children to the number and kinds of pets allowed.
They have everything necessary to live underground, such as the means to raise fruits, vegetables and animals, some basic manufacturing capability, and a rudimentary power and water system. There’s a kind of steampunk ethos at work, and it’s clearly not your father’s future. They use charcoal for writing and are running short of paper. The distant past and the natural world of the early 21st century have vanished. Worst of all, there’s no elevator in the silo, just a really long spiral staircase.
Every once in awhile, someone is sent outside in a protective suit with industrial-grade wool to clean the grime off the sensors that face the outside world and bring in diluted light. The only problem is that the engineers have yet to find a way to get the cleaners back into the silo alive.
Howey plunges right into this strange underground dystopia and builds it as the story moves along, giving the novel its zip and authority. While richly textured, the silo and the state will never be enough for these people living underground: “There was this unspoken, deadly hope in every member of the silo,” he writes. “A ridiculous, fantastical hope. That maybe not for them, but perhaps for their children, or their children’s children, life on the outside would be possible once again, and that it would be the work of it and the bulky suits that emerged from their labs that would make it all possible.”
Into this world comes a reluctant hero. Her name is Juliette, and the tale revolves around her quest to embody the hope of the underclass. She is a mechanic, a fixer of machines. She is very plucky and inventive, but Howey imbues her with enough flaws and self-doubt to make her a well-rounded protagonist who carries the reader along. She is an ideal knight-errant for our times. When she is dispatched to become a cleaner, her fellow mechanicals rise up and take arms against the state.
It’s easy to see how exuberant word of mouth spread so quickly on the Internet for “Wool.” The characters are well drawn, with a rousing protagonist and antagonist, and the plot races forward without resorting to melodrama. Most of all, the mood is rightly claustrophobic and, at times, genuinely terrifying — particularly with the very real threat of global warming looming. It’s not a perfect novel, and, at times, the method of its construction sticks out like a crooked seam. But “Wool” is the kind of sci-fi novel you can give to those who love the genre and those who never read the stuff.
Donohue is the author of “The Stolen Child” and two other novels.
WOOL
By Hugh Howey
Simon & Schuster. 537 pp. $26
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QUOTE:
it's easy to see why Wool captured readers so quickly. Give Howey slightly more time to write the next one, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with.
Wool by Hugh Howey – review
Science fiction's answer to Fifty Shades of Grey is uneven but shows a great deal of promise
Alison Flood
Alison Flood
Thu 10 Jan 2013 10.16 EST
First published on Thu 10 Jan 2013 10.16 EST
Fogginess
Familiar rotting skyline … Photograph: Steve Crisp/Reuters
Perhaps inevitably, Hugh Howey's Wool has been described as the science fiction version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Howey initially self-published the first instalment of his post-apocalyptic story – just 60 pages – in July 2011. By October, readers were clamouring for more, and he duly obliged. His novel now runs to over 500 pages and has hit US bestseller lists, with book deals on both sides of the Atlantic, and film rights picked up by Ridley Scott.
The Fifty Shades comparison does Howey an injustice, however. This author can really write, and the dystopian life he has imagined is, at times, truly disturbing. This is a world where the air is deadly, and where humanity has lived ever since anyone can remember, in a giant underground silo, a bunker hundreds of storeys deep, creating everything people need beneath the earth. The outside world can only be seen through a blurry image projected onto a wall, "lifeless hills ... a familiar rotting skyline ... ancient glass and steel". The filth of the atmosphere gradually coats the cameras capturing the view, and the silo's capital punishment is "cleaning": the criminal is sent outside to polish the lenses before being overcome by poisonous gases.
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The 60-page story with which Wool opens covers what might be the last hours of Holston, the sheriff of the silo, who is still mourning the death of his wife through "cleaning" years earlier. Inexplicably, he locks himself into the silo's holding cell. "'Get the mayor,'" Holston said. He let out a sigh, that heavy breath he'd been holding for three years. 'Tell her I want to go outside.'"
A great pleasure of dystopian fiction is the reader's excess of knowledge: we know what the world used to be, and watch characters struggle towards the truth. Howey provides this in spades. Holston is grappling his way towards a realisation that there might be more to the world than the 150 floors of the silo and its strict, unbreakable rules.
The priests say the silo has always been there, created by a benevolent god to protect them from the deadly atmosphere outside. But ancient children's books contain images of a colourful planet, and despite the edicts forbidding so much as a mention of the outside world, much of the silo yearns for it. Not Jules, though, the tough, ingenious mechanic who takes over from Holston as Howey's lead character. She's utterly unintrigued by the outside, "an uninhabitable wasteland devoid of anything useful". Clearly, then, she's going to be forced to confront the real world, and her investigations into the whys and wherefores of the silo's existence swiftly prove dangerous.
Some elements of Wool work brilliantly: the first two sections are frightening, intriguing and mysterious. Holston, the old mayor Jahns and Holston's deputy, Marnes, are unusual, fully realised characters. Jules is an attractively grease-stained heroine, and some of the tribulations Howey pushes his protagonists through are truly horrendous – and engrossing. He has had enormous fun with the details of his dystopia: the lottery inhabitants of the silo must go through to be allowed to reproduce, following a death; the reality of life in a world partitioned by a single enormous staircase; the claustrophobia of underground existence.
Other elements don't work so well. It's partly down, I think, to the way the novel developed. It started life as a very good short story. That story grew as readers fell in love with the world Howey had created, and as he wrote, the tightness and the skill with which he began unravelled somewhat. He throws in a character – Lukas, a love interest for Jules – who rings false. And while mostly he writes well, sometimes he gets a bit flowery. At one point he indulges in some truly dire love poetry ("Wait for me. Wait for me. Wait there, my dear/ Let these gentle pleas find your ear").
That said, it's easy to see why Wool captured readers so quickly. Give Howey slightly more time to write the next one, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with.
To order Wool for £7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop
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QUOTE:
Howey's strength is in his characters. They are distinct and yet familiar in their desires. They love, even when it isn't allowed, they explore even within the confines of the silo and they create. So much happens in Wool that little more can be said about the characters without giving much away. Let's just say that this is storytelling based upon good characters placed in difficult situations and not simply on world-building or laser guns, and that makes for brilliant science fiction.
GeekDad Book Review: The Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
Wool Omnibus CoverHere is a pop quiz for you: In early 2012, what author owned six of the top ten spots on the science fiction best sellers lists at Amazon.com? Would you believe it if I told you that author was an indie author who hasn't sought out a traditional publisher for their work? Hugh Howey's dystopian science fiction series Wool still remains firmly affixed on the top of the best seller lists at Amazon, rating number one in three different categories (although some of the individual stories which make up the Omnibus volume reviewed here have since dropped off the list). If you are interested in knowing a little more about Howey, I will be posting an interview in which we discuss his journey as an independent author. In Part Two of the interview we will also have a spoiler-filled discussion of the Wool series.
However, Wool is a series which deserves a spoiler-free introduction to readers wary of sorting through the piles of dross created by the ongoing ebook revolution. Howey is among a growing list of authors who are making successful careers of publishing without the assistance of agents and traditional publishing houses. The traditional argument has been that if a book couldn't find a publisher it probably wasn't worth reading. However, just as iTunes changed how consumers found music and the way in which bands made their bread, ebook readers, and in particular the Kindle, are changing the ways in which authors find their readers and make a living. All of this means the old assumptions about indie books no longer hold true and readers need to be prepared to adjust their expectations accordingly. The Wool Omnibus is a great book and deserves recognition as a full fledged contribution to the science fiction genre.What would human beings be like if for several hundred years they had been forced to live in a giant container, a refuge from the destruction of the planet? Would we recognize them? Would they have changed? Would we understand their concerns and desires? Our ubiquitous human nature and some of its seemingly unchanging characteristics are major themes in Howey's Wool. Tens of thousands of people are packed into a silo buried in the Earth, protected from the toxic atmosphere which surrounds it. Yet despite hundreds of years, the occupants still long to explore, to expand their horizons. Howey explores the traditions, mores and laws necessary to protect this remnant of humanity from the creative urges and deep desires which always seek to push beyond the safe confines of the silo into the unknown.
Wool argues that the underlying claustrophobia of such living conditions are hardwired into the human being and even hundreds of years cannot breed it out. His writing style captures this claustrophobia as occupants of what is essentially an over-sized buried skyscraper climb the single stairway which threads its way through the heart of the silo. Trips up and down the stairway become overnight adventures taking up to a week. There is room underground, but inevitably someone will decide they need to go outside and have a look around. This is a one-way trip from which none have ever returned. In fact the atmosphere outside the silo is so toxic that all those who make the trip out the airlock die within sight of the great view screens which line the top level of the bunker.
Howey's strength is in his characters. They are distinct and yet familiar in their desires. They love, even when it isn't allowed, they explore even within the confines of the silo and they create. So much happens in Wool that little more can be said about the characters without giving much away. Let's just say that this is storytelling based upon good characters placed in difficult situations and not simply on world-building or laser guns, and that makes for brilliant science fiction.
Readers who pick up the Omnibus edition without understanding that Wool developed out of a single short story may be a little confused by the episodic five sections in the book. The Wool Omnibus is really three different related stories packed into one. Impatient readers like myself may find themselves frustrated by some of the events as they unfold. I confess there was a moment in which I flipped to the end of the book just to check how it ended. All I will say is don't give up on Howey; you are in good hands. Like all thrill seekers he knows how to give his readers a great ride.
Howey's work and its success demonstrates the ongoing maturing of the indie author market. As ebook readers free themselves from the shackles of the arbiters of publishing, more and more great work will be coming straight into their hands without passing through the publishing houses. The old assumptions about indie book no longer apply; Wool clears away the grime of the past and reveals the new truth. Here is a non-traditional author who can stand proudly in the company of traditionally published writers. Hugh Howey has arrived, and his arrival heralds a new day for indie authors.
#Armchair Geek#e-books#indie#Sci-fi#wool
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Review: Wool, By Hugh Howey
A future underground sensation
David Barnett
Sunday 20 January 2013 00:00 GMT
0 comments
Dystopian fiction is big business, but very little of it is true to the definition of the word as the polar opposite of Utopia, Sir Thomas More's near-perfect society. Much contemporary dystopian fiction seems to have more to do with apocalyptic zombie movies than George Orwell's 1984 or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Hugh Howey's Wool, though, is a proper futuristic dystopia in which the dead don't eat the living but rather harbour the secrets of what has gone before; secrets to be picked at and peeled away piece by piece to unveil the true horror of the world. It calls to mind the science-fiction movies they used to make so well in the 1970s – Logan's Run or George Lucas's THX 1138.
In most dystopian fiction, the characters don't know at first that they're living in a dystopia, and so it is with Wool. Thousands of people inhabit a gigantic silo below ground. A bank of sensors transmits images of a ruined, poisoned landscape into the sealed subterranean world, but the silo is the world in total, created by God so humanity can live in an inhospitable universe that reaches only as far as the sensors can see.
On the face of it, it doesn't seem too bad a society. Overseen by an elected mayor and a sheriff who keeps order; everyone employed on one of the 150 levels, from those mining on the bottom-most storeys to those working in the cafeteria near the surface. Crime is rare, and those who commit it are given the ultimate sentence: they are sent out into the toxic atmosphere to ritually clean the sensors before collapsing, dead.
When Juliette, an engineer from the lower storeys, is chosen to be the new sheriff, and then finds herself on the wrong side of the law, the carefully maintained façade of the silo begins to crumble in a tense, character-led narrative that holds your attention to the very end.
Howey is something of a publishing phenomenon. Wool was originally self-published as a series of interlinked novellas, shifting an aston- ishing 250,000 copies. The different sections sit well as a novel, and there is only a minor amount of jarring where they are stitched together. And, with the film rights already sold to Ridley Scott, Howey's Wool is likely to be spoken about in the same breath as The Hunger Games and The Passage before long.
Wool by Hugh Howey
Wool book cover
Free preview
Rating 9.0/10
One of the most gripping and profound sci-fi novels I have read.
Book of the Month
I kindled this based on a BBC web article about the author who wrote a dystopian short story, conversed with his wife after seeing it pass a 1000 purchases on Amazon, and then decided to write a full blown novel, with a second and third to come. One of those "electronic self publish" happy stories where skill at writing fiction shone past the inevitable and usual course of publisher rejection letters. Of course, it subsequently has been picked up by a publisher like the "Fifty Shades..." series, had the aforementioned BBC article, etc... the end result is Mr Howey finds himself with a new career. I have to say that having recently seen the appalling "Cloud Atlas" - read the book, its much better - and the new Judge Dredd film I found myself reading this latest stab at a dystopia with a very critical eye. Of course, Mr Howey is treading a genre with some pretty spectacular efforts. Orwell's "1984" leaps to mind, or perhaps Atwood's "The Handmaiden's Tale". Not that, of course, a dystopia needs to be science fiction - just think of Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The ceiling is stratospheric in this field and I have to say that Howey produces a credible effort (one that appears to be snapped up for a future film and you can see why).
The novel revolves around a few key characters, headed by the enigmatic, engineering genius that is Juliette Nichols. The story commences with the last few days of Sheriff Holston whose wife, Allison, "was poking some great, overly full balloon with a needle, and Holston wanted to get that air out of it before she poked too far." The balloon that Juliette, Holston, Mayor Jahns, Deputy Marnes plus a host of others all live in is a silo - a self-contained 144 level sealed unit. None have seen fresh air, none walked outside because of the toxic nature of the world outside. The only ones who venture from this "prison" are sent as a death sentence to clean the lens of the camera - that gives the people of the silo their only view of the world - before their suit falls apart and they die. It is the death of Holston (which was the concept of the short story) that then leads the author to write the story of Juliette. A story that pits the "good" of Mechanical against the "evil" of IT. The story has as its theme the common struggle of the need for Liberty to fight the unbending narrative of Tyranny in all its forms; the threads of the plot are woven in social dogma, from enforced birth control, the chit system of payment, to the segregation of skills. The silo is a place where critical thinking is suppressed and, and inevitably becomes the birthing pits of revolution. It only takes one person to trigger great change and in this case it is Juliette. Her nemesis is Bernard, the head of IT... the Fat Controller.
The result is chaos, war, death, and a new hope.
The concept of the silo reminded me of a Mega City One Tower block or even the scurrying lifestyle in the film "City of Ember"; the claustrophobic effects closely echo (but never match) the great fears produced in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey; the revolution and uncovering of the truth has roots in the Reformation. This is a world under the control of Big Brother, one where humanity has become a seed of grain that now needs to burst free of its silo and grow towards a new sunlight.
So... this is a good opener. I will read the next, and the last. The kindle version has few mistakes, which is a pleasant surprise. Those were minor spelling issues, such as "wretch" for "retch" (page 263, location 4069). It didn't detract. I did pause two thirds of the way into the novel as too many questions were building up. I wanted to know why Juliette et al were choosing to act as they did. Luckily, picking it back up led to a rush of answers (nothing ground shaking; you'll have seen it before in many such films/books in this genre) and the novel ends with a clear direction to move in the next book - "Shift".
Give it a go. It's pretty good.
Mark, 8.5/10
--
Wool is a self-published phenomenon in the US, selling over 250,000 copies by word of mouth alone. The film rights have been sold to Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian (of Schindler’s List and Gangs of New York fame) is to write the screenplay.
If you have not already heard about it, you soon will. This is going to be a much talked about series in science fiction circles, and, with acclaimed director and producer Ridley Scott involved, it must be something special. I was eager to discover for myself whether it lived up to its lofty hype. The synopsis states:
"The world outside has grown unkind, the view of it limited, talk of it forbidden. In the ruined and hostile landscape, in a future few have been unlucky enough to survive, a community exists in a giant underground silo. Inside men and women live an enclosed life of rules and regulations, of secrets and lies.
To live, you must follow the rules. But some don’t. These are the dangerous ones; these are the people who dare to hope and dream, and who infect others with their optimism. Their punishment is simple and deadly. They are given the very thing they profess to want: They are allowed outside.
Jules is one of these people. She may well be the last."
Clearly, if you enjoy your sci-fi downbeat and dystopian, then Wool will be for you. The claustrophobia and dread permeates the opening chapters and you can sense the oppression and the subjugation. This is a society without free will; people are just worker drones going about their daily routine with no questions asked.
Before this puts you off, I must say that what prevents this from being 500 pages plus of misery and pessimism is its humanity. Characters like Holston, Marnes and of course Jules help the reader to invest in them and their fates. Howey is very good at making you think: “What would I do in this situation?”.
Below the surface of the sci-fi story there are some big and complex ideas at play. It may all sound familiar, but a closer look reveals an enthralling story about human endeavour and struggle.
Our darker nature is explored and conspiracy theorists will love it. In fact, despite its setting (a ruined world) Howey could be commenting on our present condition. Only a few brave ones like Jules question the status quo and look for answers to the nagging questions.
Howey cranks up the suspense and tension, making this one of the most gripping and profound sci-fi novels I have read. All I can say is get a copy and read it before it hits the big screen.
Daniel Cann, 9.5/10
Published 2013 by Century
ISBN: 9781780891231
This Wool book review was written by travelswithacanadian and Daniel Cann
QUOTE:
Mr. Howey comes across as a charming, self-deprecating goofball (he posted a video of himself doing ballet on his lawn on YouTube after he signed his publishing deal), but he's proven to be a savage negotiator and slick marketer.
Sci-Fi's Underground Hit
Authors are snubbing publishers and insisting on keeping e-book rights. How one novelist made more than $1 million before his book hit stores.
Is 'Wool' the Next 'Hunger Games?'
Simon & Schuster has put down six figures for print rights to a post-apocalyptic thriller called "Wool" that it believes could draw the same readers that made "The Hunger Games" trilogy a success. WSJ's Alexandra Alter reports on Lunch Break. Getty Images.
By Alexandra Alter
Updated March 14, 2013 5:45 p.m. ET
Hugh Howey's postapocalyptic thriller "Wool" has sold more than half a million copies and generated more than 5,260 Amazon reviews. Mr. Howey has raked in more than a million dollars in royalties and sold the film rights to "Alien" producer Ridley Scott.
And Simon & Schuster hasn't even released the book yet.
In a highly unusual deal, Simon & Schuster acquired print publication rights to "Wool" while allowing Mr. Howey to keep the e-book rights himself. Mr. Howey self-published "Wool" as a serial novel in 2011, and took a rare stand by refusing to sell the digital rights. Last year, he turned down multiple seven-figure offers from publishers before reaching a mid-six-figure, print-only deal with Simon & Schuster.
"I had made seven figures on my own, so it was easy to walk away," says Mr. Howey, 37, a college dropout who worked as a yacht captain, a roofer and a bookseller before he started self-publishing. "I thought, 'How are you guys going to sell six times what I'm selling now?' "
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After 360,000 Copies, Publishers Take Notice
It's a sign of how far the balance of power has shifted toward authors in the new digital publishing landscape. Self-published titles made up 25% of the top-selling books on Amazon last year. Four independent authors have sold more than a million Kindle copies of their books, and 23 have sold more than 250,000, according to Amazon.
Publishing houses that once ignored independent authors are now furiously courting them. In the past year, more than 60 independent authors have landed contracts with traditional publishers. Several won seven-figure advances. A handful have negotiated deals that allow them to continue selling e-books on their own, including romance writers Bella Andre and Colleen Hoover, who have each sold more than a million copies of their books.
Print-only deals remain extremely rare. Few publishers want to part with the fastest-growing segment of the industry. E-book sales for adult fiction and nonfiction grew by 36% in the first three quarters of 2012, compared with the previous year. Mass-market paperback sales shrank by 17% in the same period, while hardcover sales declined by 2.4%, according to a recent report from the Association of American Publishers.
When "Wool" hits bookstores next Tuesday, publishing industry insiders will be watching the experiment closely. Simon & Schuster will release a $15 paperback and a $26 hardcover simultaneously, competing directly against Mr. Howey's digital edition, which costs $5.99.
'Wool'
'Wool' none
"We would have preferred to own all the rights, but that wasn't going to happen," says Simon & Schuster President and Publisher Jonathan Karp. "It was a very unusual circumstance."
"Wool" became a viral hit last winter, a few months after Mr. Howey began publishing the five-part series on Amazon. The novel takes place in a postapocalyptic future where a few thousand remaining humans live in a giant, 144-story underground silo. Couples who want to have a child have to enter a lottery; tickets are distributed only when someone dies. Citizens who break the law are sent outside to choke to death on the toxic air. Those who are sent to their deaths are forced to clean the grime off the digital sensors that transmit grainy images of the ruined landscape to a screen inside the silo. The images are meant to remind residents that the world beyond the silo is deadly, but some begin to suspect their leaders are lying to them about what's outside and how the world came to ruin.
Mr. Howey says he was watching cable news one day when he came up with the idea of a future where people get all of their information from a single, unreliable screen.
"Wool" landed just as the entertainment industry was searching for a high-concept, dystopian hit like Suzanne Collins's young-adult "Hunger Games" trilogy or Justin Cronin's postapocalyptic vampire novel "The Passage." (Mr. Cronin blurbed "Wool," calling it "an epic feat of imagination.") The serial format helped build buzz and anticipation among binge readers who were desperate for the next installment, while the 99-cent price tag made each installment an easy impulse buy. "Wool" was the most favorably reviewed book on Amazon in 2012, with an average rating of 4.8 out of five stars. The novel seems to appeal to both men and women, and has attracted hard-core science fiction fans as well as general readers, much like "The Hunger Games."
Mr. Howey comes across as a charming, self-deprecating goofball (he posted a video of himself doing ballet on his lawn on YouTube after he signed his publishing deal), but he's proven to be a savage negotiator and slick marketer. He sent free copies of "Wool" to book bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads, a social-media site for avid readers. Early raves prompted more people to try the book, and the reviews snowballed. "Wool" now has more than 12,500 ratings and around 2,200 reviews on Goodreads. He hosted an "Ask Me Anything" session on the popular website Reddit, fielding users' questions for more than 12 hours. He encouraged fan art and fan fiction set in the "Wool" universe; his readers have designed book covers and written their own novella-length takes on the story. He conscripted 30 of his most ardent fans to be "beta" readers who edit early drafts of his books for free.
Mr. Howey grew up in Monroe, N.C., the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher. As a teenager he devoured popular science fiction books like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Ender's Game," and always had a wild imagination. He studied physics and English at the College of Charleston, but dropped out his junior year to sail to the Bahamas. He cycled through a series of odd jobs, working as a yacht captain, a roofer, and a technician for an audio-video company. Four years ago, he decided to give writing a shot. He and his wife were living in a 750-square foot house in Boone, N.C. He was unemployed; his wife, Amber Lyda, was working as a psychologist. He had an idea for a story about a young spaceship pilot who travels across the galaxy in search of her missing father. He sold the novel, "Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue," to a small Indiana publisher for less than a thousand dollars. Sales were meager.
"When he first published 'Molly Fyde,' I'd call his wife and say, 'How many books has he sold? Should I go to Amazon and buy three more?'" says his mother, Gay Murrill, who owns a yarn shop in Charleston.
Mr. Howey kept trying. He got a 30-hour-a-week job at a university bookstore that paid only $10 an hour but gave him some flexibility. He got up at two or three in the morning to write, and wrote through his lunch hour and after dinner. He designed his own cover art, enlisting his wife and sister to pose in photos. He would often jolt up in bed in the middle of the night to scribble down ideas.
"It was almost a compulsion for him," says Ms. Lyda. Ms. Lyda said she pleaded with him to leave his pen open on his nightstand, because the clicking noise of his pen kept waking her up.
"Wool" started as a short story that Mr. Howey dashed off in three weeks. He posted it on Amazon for 99 cents in July 2011. Within three months, the story had sold 1,000 copies. Mr. Howey was stunned.
"I told my wife, 'Baby, we're going to be able to pay a couple of bills off this short story,' " he said.
Readers begged for a sequel, and in November, Mr. Howey released another installment. He sold more than 3,000 copies that month. The next month, he released two more installments and sold nearly 10,000 copies total. In January, he released the final installment, for $2.99, and published all five as a single volume, for $5.99. Collectively, he sold 23,000 copies of all the editions that month. "Wool" shot up Amazon's science-fiction best-seller list. Mr. Howey quit his job.
Literary agents started courting him. The BBC proposed a television deal based on the series. Most of the agents wanted to auction off print and digital rights to the highest bidder. Mr. Howey wasn't interested. One agent, Kristin Nelson, said she didn't think he should sign away digital rights, but that she could help him with foreign rights and film and TV deals. He signed with her in January of last year. They sold the series in 24 foreign countries. Several British publishers bid on the book, and Century won rights for a high-six-figure sum.
Ms. Nelson also sent "Wool" to U.S. publishers, and received a few low six-figure offers. Mr. Howey turned them down. Through Amazon's self-publishing platform, he was collecting 70% of royalties, which amounted to nearly $40,000 a month. Most publishers offer a digital royalty rate that amounts to 10% to 15% of a book's retail price.
That spring, Mr. Howey began selling the books on Barnes & Noble 's Nook and Kobo's e-reader and through Apple's iTunes store. An agent at United Talent Agency began shopping film rights. Three studios bid on the book. 20th Century Fox and Ridley Scott, director of the blockbuster science-fiction films "Blade Runner" and "Alien," optioned it. Indie writer and director J Blakeson is writing the screenplay.
After news of the movie deal broke, publishers pounced again. Mr. Howey flew to New York in May to meet with five major publishers. Four of them bid. Mr. Howey, who by then was making $120,000 a month, wasn't swayed. Some of the publishers wanted to change the book's title, a proposal that Mr. Howey called "comical," since it would sabotage his online branding efforts. Others insisted that he immediately take down his digital edition, which would erase all records of the thousands of five-star reviews the book had accumulated, forcing him to start from scratch.
One meeting went better than the others. Mr. Howey sat down with Mr. Karp, the head of Simon & Schuster, who had heard about "Wool" from two of his top editors and from Dave Cullen, author of "Columbine," a 2009 book profiling the shooters behind the 1999 mass killing. "When I read more about it and saw what a culture phenomenon it had become, I realized it was something we should take seriously," Mr. Karp says.
Mr. Karp was unusually solicitous, asking Mr. Howey what kind of deal he would accept. Mr. Howey said he wanted a co-publishing deal, where he kept digital rights and Simon & Schuster held hardcover and paperback rights. Mr. Karp was noncommittal, and said he'd be in touch.
Sales soared over the summer. Mr. Howey and his wife moved to Jupiter, Fla. and bought a slightly larger house—900 square feet. Mr. Howey continued to write and self-publish new books, including a zombie novel and prequels to "Wool" that explore how and why the silos were built.
In October, Amazon discounted "Wool" for 24 hours as part of its Kindle Daily Deal, a discount program that highlights select titles. Amazon dropped the price on the "Wool" Omnibus, which has all five stories, from $5.99 to $1.99. Mr. Howey sold 20,000 in a single day. New offers from publishers poured in, some in the low-seven-figure range.
Then Mr. Howey's agent got an email from Mr. Karp, asking if they would consider a print-only deal. Ms. Nelson says she wrote him back, "Is this for real?" and he wrote back, "Yes."
Simon & Schuster now has to transform a digital hit into a traditional print blockbuster. The publisher is sending Mr. Howey on an 11-city tour, and has planned a bold six-figure marketing campaign that will capitalize on the film news and online reviews. They are releasing the book simultaneously in hardcover and paperback in an attempt to capture both the library and first-edition collectors market as well as retailers like Target and Wal-Mart . Much of the online marketing will fall to Mr. Howey, who has proved himself to be adept at digital self promotion. He's still selling 50,000 e-books a month.
"A lot of the things we normally teach authors to do, Hugh has been smart enough to do himself," says Richard Rhorer, who oversees marketing at Simon & Schuster.
Mr. Howey just returned from book tours in Germany, Scotland, Wales and England, where "Wool" recently hit the best-seller lists. He's starting to feel more like an established author. "Publishing is changing so quickly that we are all equal experts," he said. "We're all trying to figure this out."
Mr. Howey recalls feeling anonymous at a science fiction conference last summer in Chicago. He got excited for a moment when a woman approached him—he thought she wanted his autograph—but she was looking for the bathroom.
Nearby, fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, author of the best-selling series "A Song of Ice and Fire," was signing hundreds of books. Mr. Howey went up and introduced himself. When it became clear that Mr. Martin had never heard of him, Mr. Howey told him his novel was No. 6 on Amazon's list of science-fiction and fantasy best sellers, behind Mr. Martin's five books. Mr. Martin gamely signed a book for Mr. Howey, inscribing it "To # 6—Keep trying!"
A few months later, Mr. Howey landed at the top of the list, just ahead of Mr. Martin.
QUOTE:
Howey’s self-published sci-fi hit, which took off as an e-book, demonstrates how digital technology continues to transform publishing. But his particular story has made headlines for another reason: When he parlayed his success on Amazon into a mid-six figure print deal with Simon & Schuster, he negotiated to keep the e-book rights.
Monroe author is making millions online with 'Wool'
By Pam Kelley - pkelley@charlotteobserver.com
May 19, 2013 12:48 AM
Updated May 19, 2013 11:12 AM
When Publishers Weekly finally reviewed the dystopian sci-fi thriller “Wool” last month, its assessment was lukewarm. The reviewer called Monroe native Hugh Howey’s characters bland and his writing immature.
But it didn’t much matter. By the time the review came out, Howey already had sold more than half a million copies of his “Wool” stories, the saga of a post-apocalyptic civilization that lives in a giant underground silo. He even missed the review, because he was busy meeting fans on a book tour in Australia and New Zealand.
Howey’s self-published sci-fi hit, which took off as an e-book, demonstrates how digital technology continues to transform publishing. But his particular story has made headlines for another reason: When he parlayed his success on Amazon into a mid-six figure print deal with Simon & Schuster, he negotiated to keep the e-book rights.
It’s rare for a publisher to let an author keep those lucrative rights. But the deal shows that, at least in some literary genres, authors, not publishers, now hold the upper hand.
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Howey’s personal story is as unusual as his publishing deal.
As a young man, years before becoming a New York Times bestselling author, he fixed computers at Computer City on Independence Boulevard, waited tables dressed as a court jester at a Charlotte restaurant, captained yachts, shingled roofs and worked in Appalachian State University’s bookstore.
He quit his bookstore job just over a year ago, after his e-book sales took off.
Howey, 37, who now lives with his wife in Jupiter, Fla., said in a telephone interview that he didn’t expect this success. In fact, he doubted “Wool” was marketable. It is a dark story, and it doesn’t end happily.
A dream at 99 cents
Howey grew up in Union County. His dad, Hamp Howey, who now lives in Colorado, was a farmer. (Perhaps the farm’s grain silos subconsciously inspired his son’s fictional subterranean silo.)
His mom, Gay Murrill, taught at Monroe’s Piedmont High School. She now owns a yarn shop in Charleston.
Howey graduated from Piedmont, then went to ECPI, a for-profit university in Charlotte, where he learned to repair computers. He graduated in 1994.
Later, rebounding from a failed marriage, he sold most of his possessions and enrolled at the College of Charleston, where he lived not in a dorm, but on a sailboat.
“I’m pretty impulsive, I guess,” he says.
Though he’d always been a voracious reader, Howey says he was a lazy student. He finally got serious, he says, during his sophomore year at Charleston. But he was also becoming a serious sailor, enamored of Joshua Slocum’s 1900 memoir, “Sailing Alone Around the World.” He ended up leaving college to pilot yachts.
More jobs followed. After moving to Virginia with Amber Lyda, his wife, he worked as a roofer for a couple of years while she worked on her PhD in psychology. Roofing was a “perfect daydreaming job,” he says. Perched on roofs, he thought up ideas for his books.
When Lyda took a job at Appalachian State, Howey got the bookstore job and wrote in his spare time.
In 2009, he published the novel “Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue,” the first of a series. It’s the story of a spaceship pilot who travels the galaxy in search of her father.
He put his first “Wool” story on Amazon in July 2011 for 99 cents, opening with a sentence designed to grab readers: “The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.”
The original story, a longish short story at about 12,500 words, describes a society forced by a toxic atmosphere to live in an underground 144-story silo. Every so often, someone is sent outside to clean dirt off sensors that bring in light. That’s where the book gets its title. The cleaning is done with industrial-grade wool. The downside to the scrubbing job? No one has figured out how to get the person back into the silo alive.
Within a couple of months, to Howey’s surprise, his sales began climbing. He sold about 1,000 copies in October 2011 alone. Readers posted glowing reviews – and told him they wanted more.
He got busy. Three months later, he had published four additional “Wool” stories and was selling thousands of e-books a month on Amazon. “It was just an incredible trajectory,” he says.
Once sales began climbing, Howey used Facebook and his website, hughhowey.com, to publicize the books.
By March 2012, less than a year after selling his first “Wool” story on Amazon, he was earning enough to quit his bookstore job. He generated more buzz by hosting an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit.com: “I’m a self-published author who quit his day job,” he wrote, and invited people to ask him anything.
For 12 hours, he sat with his laptop answering questions and giving self-publishing advice.
As sales rose, literary agents offered to represent him. After the BBC contacted him about making “Wool” a television show, he says, he hired an agent and ended up selling film rights to 20th Century Fox. Director Ridley Scott is interested in adapting “Wool” to the screen.
$100,000 a month
Howey was determined to retain e-book rights. Publishers offered seven figures for a print and e-book deal, but he turned them down.
Howey says it simply made no sense to sell those digital rights. His e-book sales were bringing in more than $100,000 a month. A publisher, he suspected, would double the $5.99 e-book price of his “Wool” five-story omnibus, a move sure to dampen sales. In the U.S., Howey says about 90 percent of his book sales are in e-book form. Abroad, that number is about 55 percent.
Eventually, Simon & Schuster agreed to buy print rights only. Asked by the Observer why the publisher agreed to make the deal, a spokeswoman declined comment.
But the deal seems certain to make the publisher money – just not as much as it would make with digital rights. Though e-book sales are growing – they accounted for 20 percent of publishers’ revenues in 2012, up from 15 percent in 2011 – print still dominates. A Bowker Market Research survey of regular book buyers found about 75 percent bought a print book only while 17 to 20 percent bought an e-book only. About six percent bought a print and e-book.
In March, Simon & Schuster published “Wool” in paperback and hardback, and Howey embarked on a book tour that began in Europe and ended in New Zealand. He didn’t make it to North Carolina, but says he plans to do an N.C. tour in July, when he returns home for a family reunion.
Howey is modest about his success. “Wool,” he says, has probably received more attention than it deserves. “I read better books all the time.”
Why did it succeed when most books don’t? There are many possible reasons. The stories, priced at 99 cents, encouraged impulse buys. The cryptic title, “Wool,” didn’t sound like science fiction and may have attracted non-sci-fi fans. And the fact that five “Wool” stories were showing up at the same time as Amazon top sellers may have piqued readers’ curiosity.
Undoubtedly, glowing reader reviews were key. “There’s nothing you can do that replaces reader word of mouth, which nobody knows how to generate,” Howey says.
Breaking out
Howey’s success offers more proof that e-books – and self-publishing – are in their ascendancy, says Danny O. Snow, a senior fellow with The Society for New Communications Research, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
These days, self-published authors such as Bella Andre and CJ Lyons regularly appear on New York Times bestseller lists. Self-published titles made up 25 percent of the top-selling books on Amazon last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The stigma of self-publishing,” Snow says, “has largely vanished.”
Howey believes self-published authors are succeeding because traditional publishers aren’t meeting readers’ demands for certain literary genres, particularly science fiction, romance and erotica. E.L. James’ three-volume erotic novel, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” is a prime example. Random House has sold more than 70 million print, e-book and audio copies of the trilogy, which began as a self-published book.
Howey understands why publishers are reluctant to lard their catalogues with these genres. “It would be jarring if half the Penguin catalogue was erotica,” he says. “I think their self-respect is more important than the bottom line.”
He says he also knows that many authors – more than the literary establishment realizes – are making a good living through self-publishing. Months ago, he did an informal survey, posting a message on an Amazon Kindle forum asking for examples of self-published writers earning $100 to $500 a month.
He got at least 1,000 responses, he says, with many people noting they were earning a lot more than the range he had posted. “I’ve heard from people making tens of thousands of dollars,” he says, “and I’ve never heard of their books.”
Rising above the noise
Snow believes Howey was smart to retain e-book rights. In fact, he argues that an author whose e-books are selling briskly would make more money by self-publishing print books and bypassing traditional publishing completely.
That’s exactly what Howey is doing now. He doesn’t regret his foray into traditional publishing, but in January, he self-published “The Shift Omnibus,” a prequel to “Wool.” He’s writing “Dust,” the third and final part of the saga, and he has no immediate plans to publish either of those books traditionally in the United States.
You can now get his first “Wool” story on Amazon for free, by the way. “I’m of the idea that it’s so hard to rise above the noise, free is a good way to break out.”
Howey argues that more traditional publishers should allow self-published authors to retain e-book rights, as he did. “It’s only fair,” he says, “if you’ve already published with e-books and are successful.”
Though Publishers Weekly wasn’t crazy about “Wool,” other reviewers have raved. “The characters are well drawn,” the Washington Post wrote, “with a rousing protagonist and antagonist, and the plot races forward without resorting to melodrama.”
Most importantly, readers have raved. Howey’s “Wool” now has more than 4,700 Amazon reviews. They average 4.7 out of five stars.
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QUOTE:
It is hard to overestimate how impressive Howey’s world building skills are. ‘Sand’ is another brilliantly realised world that feels both fantastical and realistic at once.
Sand by Hugh Howey
Sand by Hugh Howey
1780893183.jpg
Buy Sand by Hugh Howey at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Dystopian Fiction
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: Sam Tyler
Reviewed by Sam Tyler
Summary: Four siblings find themselves living in Springston, a town situated on the edge of an endless desert. The only means of income is to dive into the depth and retrieve items from a lost past. Their latest discovery may just change the world they live in. 'Sand' is a masterclass in dystopian world building by an author at the peak of his powers.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 384 Date: June 2014
Publisher: Century
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781780893181
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World building in science fiction is easier said than done. How can you design a completely foreign place and explain it all to your reader, whilst still writing a compelling narrative? If you are an author such as Hugh Howey, the answer is with consummate ease. Howey has already got the fabulous ‘Wool’ trilogy under his belt and following this up was always going to be the difficult second album syndrome. Well, be prepared to be sucked quickly into ‘Sand’, his new novel.
Set in a possible future Earth, ‘Sand’ tells the story of a family’s struggle in an America covered in desert. With the constant winds the town of Springston is constantly shifting with the dunes, the only means of currency is found by diving under the layers of silica and plundering the buried cities of old. Vic, Palmer, Connor and Rob are four siblings who specialise in this. When Palmer is hired to explore deep in the desert what he discovers may just change how everyone in Springston perceives the world around them.
It is hard to overestimate how impressive Howey’s world building skills are. ‘Sand’ is another brilliantly realised world that feels both fantastical and realistic at once. Rather than boring the reader with a prologue novel that explains what happened to Earth, Howey instead plunges his characters into adventure and lets the reader work things out for themselves. Within a few pages your imagination is captured and you know exactly what type of world Howey has created; one of struggles caused by the folly of man.
There is a sense of place and texture to the world of ‘Sand’. Howey, has built a society from the ground up and then written a story within these rules (you will be surprised how many science fiction novels do not do this). There is a believable explanation to how water is gathered, how items are bargained for and how people manage to survive. Simple use of language enriches the novel. Whilst some indigenous people have many words for snow, in ‘Sand’ the people of Springston has many words for sand. This reaffirms how their daily lives are impacted by the stuff; there are different worlds for the sand that falls out of your hair, gather in your boots, when it is wet, when it is hard. This simple use of language really gives weight to the daily struggles that the characters face.
As well as having the great world, Howey is also a great creator of character and relationships. ‘Wool’ concentrated mostly on a protagonist who fought for herself, but here we have a family that must think of the needs of others, as well as their own. The family are instantly likable, but flawed enough to be believable. With their abandonment issues they all struggle to be better people. Vic in particular is excellent, another great female character from the pen (typewriter/keyboard) of Howey. The events which happen to Vic throughout the novel twist and turn. Howey’s ability to shock is wonderful, adding a tension to the entire experience, as you never know who will live and who will die.
Another excellent aspect of ‘Sand’ is that Howey has created a story that works within one novel, but remains open for future instalments should he wish. Too many modern fantasy and science fiction titles are written with a trilogy or series in mind meaning that each book ends in a cliff-hanger and a sense of closure is seldom found. Here, Howey has created a complete adventure, but the world still exists. In the future he could choose to continue the adventure of the survivors here, or explore a completely different element of the world.
‘Sand’ is another brilliantly realised and well written novel by Howey. The world itself is intriguing, the characters likable and the story impactful. It explores issues of family, environment, survival, as well as being thrilling and funny in places. Fans of dystopian science fiction should certainly pick up this title, but it will work for any lover of thrilling novels.
Sammy Recommendation
If this book appeals then we think that you'll also enjoy Fragments by Dan Wells and God's War by Kameron Hurley.
Buy Sand by Hugh Howey at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Sand by Hugh Howey at Amazon.co.uk
Buy Sand by Hugh Howey at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Sand by Hugh Howey at Amazon.com.
Wool, Gathering
How self-pubbed best-seller Hugh Howey overturned the author-reader relationship—and wrote the next great sci-fi saga.
By Tammy Oler
130227_SBR_Wool_ILLO
Illustration by Danny Gregory
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When bookstore employee and indie author Hugh Howey published his short story “Wool” as a 99-cent e-book on Amazon in July of 2011, he wasn’t banking on the story transforming his career. He didn’t even post a link to the story on his own website. But “Wool,” about a post-apocalyptic future in which society has been forced to live underground in a vast silo, quickly became the most popular thing he had ever written. By the end of October, the story had made it on the Kindle sci-fi best-seller list. Howey started to get emails from readers asking him for the rest of the story. There was no rest of the story, so Howey decided to write it.
By January 2012, Howey had self-published five serial stories about that underground silo and collected all five into an ebook, the Wool Omnibus. Even as the Omnibus landed on the New York Times best-seller list in the summer of 2012 , Howey kept churning out prequels. And by the end of 2012, Howey had negotiated sweetheart deals with major publishing houses to release print editions of Wool worldwide and had even optioned the film rights to Ridley Scott. Simon and Schuster releases Wool, a print edition of the Wool Omnibus, this month.
Howey’s self-publishing Cinderella story is so compelling that it often becomes the media story about Wool. But way more fascinating than that is the way the world of Wool reflects our own world—and how Howey’s interactions with readers are overturning the traditional relationship between an author, his creations, and his audience.
As Wool opens, Holston, the sheriff of the silo, is being sent to “cleaning,” a punishment that takes him to the toxic surface to scrub the sensors that project a view of the world above to the silo below. The description of the view is one of the only clues Howey provides about the world before the silo was created. It’s a “familiar and rotting skyline” in which “ancient glass and steel stood distantly where people, it was suspected, had once lived aboveground.” Like his wife, who had been sent to cleaning three years prior, Holston had committed the worst sin imaginable in the silo: asking to go outside. In Wool, cleaning is both death sentence and human sacrifice: The pressure felt by thousands of people underground grows “like steam building up in the silo, ready to launch something out” and is transferred to one person, purged in an act conceived to remind the community that their silo is a shelter, not a prison.
Of course, the silo feels like both, and that tension is at the heart of Wool. Holston’s cleaning sets off a chain of events that transition the action from short story to serial novel. Soon, the mayor of the silo needs to appoint a new sheriff and selects a smart and strong-willed candidate from the silo’s mechanical department named Juliette. Juliette becomes obsessed with figuring out Holston’s motivations, and her subsequent determination to uncover the truth about the silo’s history and who’s really in control of it (which I won’t reveal here) creates the powder keg for an uprising within the silo. The escalation of anger to fissures within the silo and then finally to conflict is rendered deftly, and the pace at which Howey reveals the inner workings of the world of the silo makes Wool a page-turner.
The intrigue of Wool (the title comes from the scrubbers used by people sent to clean the sensors on the surface) is enjoyable and thought-provoking, but it’s how Howey borrows from our present that really makes Wool resonate with readers. In many ways, the silo is a triumph of human survival and sustainability. It’s an energy-independent community with 100 percent employment and universal access to education and health care. But it’s also a carefully designed system with zero population growth, a lack of media, and social stratification created by the architecture of the silo itself. More than 100 floors deep and connected by only a narrow circular staircase, the silo is designed to limit mobility and communication, separating the mechanical department at the bottom, the mayor and sheriff up top, and the IT department as far away from both of them as possible. Readers’ fascination of Wool is powered not by the novelty of the silo, but the frightening familiarity of it. While most post-apocalyptic fiction invites us to imagine how civilization might evolve after the world as we know it ends, Wool instead invites us to imagine what it might take—and what the costs might be—to prevent civilization from ever evolving beyond where we are right now.
Howey also taps into many of our current anxieties. Who controls the flow of information to all of our screens? How much privacy and control are we willing to give up to ensure domestic security? And how much good will it do to know the truth if you can’t change the system? It’s this last question that fuels uprising in the silo. Knox, the head of Mechanical who rallies his colleagues and others to revolt, explains why his anger compels him to violence: “I only want to hurt those that lied,” he says. “That’s all any of us want. We’ve all lived in fear. Fear of the outside. Fear of cleaning. Afraid to even talk about a better world. And none of it was true. The system was rigged, and in a way to make us hang our heads and take it.” Being in the silo is like living in a world where the decisions were made a long time ago by people you didn’t vote for. Sound familiar?
The disenfranchisement of silo residents contrasts interestingly with the way the stories themselves invert the traditional power dynamic between author and fan. By reaching out to Howey and leaving reviews that asked for more, fans helped conjure the fictional world that has come to mean so much to them. And through the power of self-publishing and social media, Howey converted interest in the first story into dedicated fandom and hundreds of thousands of e-book sales. By publishing Wool serially, he was able to deliver stories quickly, building readership, excitement, and Amazon reviews that often resulted in Wool stories occupying multiple slots on the same Amazon best-seller lists. He has extensively blogged about his progress, posted videos on his website, and responded personally to his readers via email, social media, and meetups. He hid his phone number on the cover of one of his self-published print editions as an Easter egg to fans, and he’s taken the time to have phone conversations with fans that have called him. He’s even sprinkled a few references to specific fans in his more recent stories, including a mention of the navy ship USS The Sullivans, whose crew—living themselves in something of a “silo at sea”—wrote to him about how much they loved Wool.
Author Hugh Howey.
Author Hugh Howey.
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Most intriguingly, Howey has encouraged readers who want to develop their own Wool stories to self-publish and sell their works. In an interview, I asked Howey about why he’s not just encouraging fan fiction but actually endorsing it. “There’s room for readers to become writers and play in this world,” he said. “I view fan fiction as the opportunity to teach readers how much joy there is in creating worlds instead of just living in them.” Right now—much to Simon and Schuster’s chagrin, one has to imagine—the first two of what are sure to be many Wool-related fan fiction stories are available for sale on Amazon.
But Howey is making some changes with Dust, the Wool sequel he’s currently writing. First, it likely won’t be a serial. “I think I’m going to write it as a single work,” said Howey. “In fairness to the reader, I think it’s going to be nice to give them the entire work so they don’t have to wait in between pieces.” The sequel also promises to be darker than Wool: “At what point does an uprising cause more harm than an evil totalitarian regime?” asked Howey. “That’s not a fun question to ask, because we’re used to telling stories where we overthrow the bad guys and everyone lives happily ever after.”
Will fans tolerate a Juliette who does as much harm as good? Will fans tolerate a Howey who does not solicit feedback and encouragement as he creates the next (and final, he says) installment of their favorite series? Perhaps not, and it’s fascinating that Howey’s planning on exercising his authorial power without necessarily seeking buy-in from readers. It’s a little bit more silo-like than what he’s done in the past.
“That’s a challenge,” Howey noted. But he promised an apology to readers at the end, and an opportunity that will continue his stories’ reimagining of the author/reader relationship: “Like, ‘Thank you for suffering through all of this; here’s a glimmer of hope. Now go write some fan fiction and tell me what happens next.’ ”
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Wool by Hugh Howey. Simon and Schuster.
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Looking at Nationalism : A Review of the Book WOOL by HUGH HOWEY
By Frank Cetera on
This is the author’s first book review analysis attempting to understand the root causes of dystopian fiction through the lens of political, social, and economic factors, for the purpose of understanding modern day realities of existence and struggle.
World War II expressed Nationalism in all of its glory as a rationale for empire. The antagonist nation in wool did the same, but with the high
technology available to them, created an almost instantaneous “final solution” that led to hundreds of years of isolated life for the chosen few in huge underground silos that reached 140 stories downward.
Dystopian fiction can be classified in many categorical ways. One popular theme is related to the form of disaster that initiates the apocalyptic future depicted - nuclear war (Riddley Walker), terrorism (The Handmaid’s Tale), economic collapse (World Made By Hand), and the list goes on and on, (all of which I look forward to exploring in future segments of this series). What these thematic examples often fail to elaborate thoroughly upon, or provide any deep-seated analysis of, is the root causes of the focal events in these tales. Can we learn more, and come to a fuller potential understanding, of our current societal state by being aware of the root events from dystopian fiction?
We can know that it is climate change and the resulting rising coastal waters, increased extreme weather phenomena, and encroaching desertification that an example population of dystopian survivors are living with; though what of the social, political, and economic legacies that led to this fictional reality in the first place? But since these stories are often about just surviving the day, finding enough canned goods and safe spaces to see another sunrise, there is little time left for dealing with, or even thinking about, the mistakes of the past, and they are often hidden from the characters in the books.
This is analogous to how our current media, political parties, and corporate powers attempt to hide the realities of today so as not to arouse a panic which would sink the Dow Jones index, the only apocalyptic state that would seem to frighten these power mongers. And this is all too similar to what is happening in our modern times, with many people living paycheck to paycheck, if they have a paycheck at all, and our solutions often amount to no more than slowing the tide with philanthropic charity giveaways of food and clothes. When looked at in such a lense, it’s just as fair to claim we are currently living in an apocalyptic dystopia as we have ever seen in a futuristic novel depiction.
With the story of Wool, upon review, it can be surmised that many of the events evolve out of a legacy of nationalism. There is no better time than the current tide of nationalist politics, such as Donald Trump’s rise to popularity, to make sure we are aware of such a current. Wool allows us to share a fictionalized, and entertaining yet frightening, depiction of nationalism with an extended audience, with an extended mission of education about this root cause of destruction for society.
In Wool, the nationalist state is completely hidden from the population and all the characters living in the silo, because they are completely isolated from any other segment of humanity. The reality they live is the only reality they know, for the creators of the silos ensured that by using their nationalist zeal to destroy the rest of mankind. The history of the human race before entering the silos is now a completely hidden non-reality, kept secret by the authoritarian leaders of Operation Fifty of the World Order. Operation Fifty is a clandestine supreme authority bent on keeping the silo populations oblivious to the past in order to ensure a rise to greatness for this homogenous population at some undetermined point in the future.
The greatest fear for many civilizations has always been that a competing nation-state would be the culprit in a final warmongering devastation. The fear in Wool arose from the actual fictional reality that the nation of the silo creators was crumbling, and that without action, their being would be eventually annihilated from any or many enemies. So they took action first, not to care about humanity as a whole, but to ensure the people of their own nation-state would be the only ones to survive.
During the course of the current existence of the silo dwellers, the nationalism flourishes from many instances. The authority, hidden wthin the IT (Information Technology) population sector of the silo (since it controls communications and information), creates a scarcity to keep people struggling for daily bread, preventing any semblance of ability to wonder what else might exist outside the walls of the silo. They use a form of punishment that banishes offenders into the wasteland outside the silo, to die in the poisonous environment that exists on Earth. Yet the true reason for this punishment is the cleaning of the lens of the exterior cameras, to maintain the authority over, and unity of, the silo residents by continually reinforcing the view that only they exist, that the world outside the silo does not exist, and it is not worth spending time or energy thinking or doing anything about it.
The name wool certainly pertains to the use of wool as the cleaning tool used to restore the clear and unobstructed view of the exterior world. Yet we see that the true reality is that the book’s name refers to the pulling of the wool over the eyes of the silo inhabitants, to maintain the homogenous population’s obliviousness in the name of a nationalist utopia in the making.
Modern theory holds that for nationalism to arise and thrive, there needs to be three factors in place: an industrial economy capable of self-sustainability of the society, a central supreme authority capable of maintaining authority and unity, and a centralized language or small group of centralized languages understood by a community of people (from Wikipedia). Wool demonstrates all three of these factors with each silo being designed to be self-sustaining including their own Supply and Engineering population classes, existing in the Operation Fifty of the World Order, and the survival of a singular segment of humanity as initiated by the creators of the silos. The creation of the silos that saved this particular population from the oncoming global catastophe of war were necessary at the time, for otherwise death and destruction would have potentially found all inhabitants of the globe. The unfortunate decision made by Operation Fifty of the World Order was not to save their civilization, but to instill in it the continued traits of nationalism which likely led to the destructive wars to begin with. Time (and sequels) will only tell if the unwilling participants of this dystopian future can lead themselves out of authoritarianism and away from fear of any others that may exist in the other remaining silos, and into a re-established democracy as peoples of inalienable rights in equality with survivors of other silos - not as masters.
QUOTE:
quick, easy read, especially since most of the events involve only one character.
Book review: 'Beacon 23: The Complete Novel' by Hugh Howey
Ken Raymond by Ken Raymond Published: April 3, 2016 12:00 AM CDT Updated: April 3, 2016 12:00 AM CDT
“Beacon 23: The Complete Novel” by Hugh Howey (John Joseph Adams, 256 pages, in stores)
The narrator of Hugh Howey's latest serial novel is a supposed war hero so broken by the depravities of intergalactic war that he has opted to live alone in a metal beacon far out in the depths of space.
The beacons are like the lighthouses of past ages, except these guide ships travel at faster than light speeds away from danger ... like the asteroid belt near Beacon 23.
One day our unnamed hero's beacon apparently malfunctions, and a space freighter plows into the asteroids, causing a million tiny explosions and setting debris and valuable bits of cargo adrift in space. It also shatters some of the space rocks, endangering the beacon itself.
Our protagonist realizes two things: Someone has hacked into his system, shutting down the beacon, and a cruise ship carrying 5,000 passengers is about to arrive any moment. Even as he sees modern-day “wreckers” — the folks who disabled the beacon so they could plunder the remains of the ship — go to work outside, he launches into frantic procedures to regain control before the passenger liner is drawn into disaster, as well.
He succeeds, but some vital synapse in his brain has triggered, and his tenuous grip on reality loosens even more. He believes he has discovered a rock that is smarter and better spoken than he is. He deals with three bounty hunters who've arrived within minutes of each other, all seeking his former flame, who has snuck aboard the beacon without his knowledge.
He meets another woman when a second beacon is placed in proximity to his, and while she makes him question the things he has believed, she also provides him with his first female comfort since his battlefield days.
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And ultimately he discovers that he may be the key to ending the war once and for all — or at least for ending the human race.
It's a quick, easy read, especially since most of the events involve only one character. It's quite good in its way, too, a bit like “The Martian” if the astronaut in that novel had just kind of hung out back in the Hab without working very hard on his survival. Our hero is flawed, hailed for an act that he views as cowardly, and in the end readers are left to wonder if he's actually a hero or a fool.
The book was released in February as “the complete novel,” a nod to Howey's unusual position in the writing industry. He is best known for the “Wool” omnibus, a series of novellas that he published online and which were later released in a one-volume book. He signed publishing agreements with houses in two countries but retained the digital rights so he could continue to pull in cash from downloads. As a book, “Wool” went on to sell more than 2 million copies.
Howey has penned other series since, including the five stories that would become “Beacon 23.” It's an innovative way to control the publishing and distribution of material, but Howey may be too singular of a talent for the tactic to be repeated successfully. And even here it's not perfect. While “Beacon 23” is, in a sense, one story, it's also five. There's a sort of jerkiness to the section breaks that interrupts the story cohesion.
If you enjoyed “Wool,” you will certainly like “Beacon 23,” although it's not quite as good. As a $4.99 digital download on Amazon, it's cheaper than a paperback. Why not give it a try?
— Ken Raymond, Book Editor
Ken Raymond
Ken Raymond
Ken Raymond is the book editor. He joined The Oklahoman in 1999. He has won dozens of state, regional and national writing awards. Three times he... read more ›
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‘Sand’, by Hugh Howey
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Review by James Lovegrove June 13, 2014
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Sand, by Hugh Howey, Century, RRP£18.99, 371 pages
In Howey’s bestselling Silo trilogy – Wool, Shift, Dust – the remnants of humankind huddle in a vast underground bunker, pining for the lost, contaminated surface world. His new novel, Sand, inverts that idea: the inhabitants of a blighted, desert-covered Colorado dive to retrieve and sell cherished artefacts from the cities buried below.
Palmer, a diver, discovers the fabled city of “Danvar”, before being betrayed and left for dead by his partner. Meanwhile, his siblings scrabble to make a living in the shanty town of Springston. Their mother runs the local brothel, and there are desperadoes who are seeking to destroy what little civilisation remains.
Sand immerses you in its grubby post-apocalyptic world. Through telling details – such as the different names people have for types of sand – Howey conjures a credible, brutal future.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
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QUOTE:
The genius of Beacon 23 is that it takes a setting separated by swaths of time and space and makes the story so intimately personal that there’s never a disconnect between the protagonist’s experiences and the experiences a modern-day reader might have.
Book Review: Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey
By Michael Mitchell
@MitchFizzl
“A spectacularly told tale of one man’s experience with depression, guilt, love, and hope.” A spoiler free review.
For centuries, men and women have manned lighthouses to ensure the safe passage of ships. It is a lonely job, and a thankless one for the most part. Until something goes wrong. Until a ship is in distress. In the twenty-third century, this job has moved into outer space. A network of beacons allows ships to travel across the Milky Way at many times the speed of light. These beacons are built to be robust. They never break down. They never fail. At least, they aren’t supposed to.
Outside of the simple, yet enticing cover, that was the description that drew me to Hugh Howey’s Beacon 23. At the time, I was midway through the Mass Effect series and my mind immediately drew parallels between the two. With the added promise of “aliens, war, and madness,” I couldn’t help but set my own expectations for what I was about to read. I picked up the book ready for a classic sci-fi space adventure. What I got was something entirely different, something deeply personal. Oh, it certainly fit the description above; but it was much better reflected in the dedication before the novel’s opening pages: For those who suffer alone.
Originally released in five separate parts of the course of several months, the full series is now available in a single novel. It wasn’t until after I’d finished reading the entire collection that I realized Howey had hoped readers would pause between parts to let the individual stories linger. I feel a bit guilty not having done that — unless a day or so in between parts is considered enough of a pause — but Howey’s writing makes it hard to not want to continue onward. At the same time, the separation of parts helps keep readers from ever feeling like they’re not going to accomplish much by sitting down and reading for less than thirty minutes.
In broad strokes, the series tells the story of an unnamed protagonist operating what is, essentially, a space lighthouse. As ships approach the beacon, they receive a signal that warns them to slow down, ensuring safe passage through the less forgiving reaches of space. Amidst this man’s job operating Beacon 23, a war is raging between humans and an alien species called the Ryph. This war exists mostly in the background and in our protagonist’s past as a war hero, but that past helps set up the character we come to know very intimately over the course of the novel.
See, this character first set out to operate one of these space lighthouses after becoming a war hero in the eyes of the public. He clearly feels guilty over earning this title, though, and the reason for his guilt unfolds in the background as each individual story is told. He is haunted by this experience and memories of the war, so he chose to operate a beacon to get away from service and hide from the war. But escaping the war isn’t easy, especially when the memories still play themselves over in your mind.
Beacon 23 Art
Image credit: Ben Adams.
Howey brilliantly uses the different parts to tell stories that could easily be self-contained but still work together to paint an even bigger picture of this beacon’s operator. Each section has its own story with an underlying theme that ties to an aspect of depression and/or PTSD. What happens when you get the solitude you wanted? Can a break in the solitude be a good thing, or will it just lead to more hurt? How can we connect if we feel empty ourselves? None of this is to say the story lacks humor — the protagonist’s dialog and narration are presented with unfiltered wit and sarcasm and each section manages to fit in enough comic relief through them that the tone is never one-note. (One particular exchange in the second section had me laughing right alongside the narrator.)
These stories are told succinctly, never overstaying their welcome but never feeling as though details have been left out. Not only that, but Howey takes advantage of this structure to catch readers off guard with a fifth story that ties everything that came before it together. Details both major and minor all come into play in one amazing culmination that feels like it ends as soon as it begins.
The genius of Beacon 23 is that it takes a setting separated by swaths of time and space and makes the story so intimately personal that there’s never a disconnect between the protagonist’s experiences and the experiences a modern-day reader might have. War is war, now and in the future. Loneliness is loneliness, depression is depression. The series brilliantly explores all of this in a way that sometimes feels just a little too real.
Howey’s language also contributes to this ease of access; wherever possible, he avoids unnecessary jargon in favor of straightforward dialog. As far as science fiction writing is concerned, readers are never going to run into made-up words that aren’t both quickly explained and easily relatable. That doesn’t mean that Howey doesn’t find a way to use them to maximum effect, however. Notably, Part 2 — a tie with the final section as my personal favorite — uses the novel’s limited usage of jargon to tell a perfect story of loneliness and companionship.
If there’s a downside to Beacon 23, it’s that it can be painfully real at times. Everything our protagonist experiences can easily have a personal equivalent for the reader. And if you’ve ever suffered — or still are suffering — from depression or PTSD, this book will likely open some old wounds. The book ultimately ends on a hopeful note, but the journey there can be rough at times.
That being said, I still highly recommend you give this a read. Whether or not you take breaks between sections, the overall time investment is minimal for a spectacularly told tale of one man’s experience with depression, guilt, love, and hope. If this sounds like your cup of tea, the book is available in full on Amazon. If you’re on the fence and have Kindle, you can always give the Part 1 a read on its own — though I recommend at least reading through Part 2. (And remember, Blizzard Watch makes a small commission if you purchase the book from one of the links listed here!)
If you’ve read the book, please let us know what you think! Just remember to gives a heads up if you’re going to mention any plot details. And if you’re interested in more of Howey’s work, you can find him on Twitter as well as his personal website.
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Filed Under: Beacon 23, Book Review, Hugh Howey
QUOTE:
What we get in Dust is a non-stop, cohesive story line of ‘go, go, go!’ and I’m happy to say that it was my absolute favorite of the trilogy.
Dust (Silo #3) by Hugh Howey Book Review
Rebecca Skane Science Fiction No responses July 4, 2015
Dust wraps up the Silo omnibus trilogy by Hugh Howey, an incredible post-apocalyptic tale in which the ‘making of’ is a remarkable story in itself. The first book in the series, Wool, was originally self-published as a set of five short stories. When Howey self-published the first short story in the Wool Omnibus, it went viral almost immediately. The series was quickly picked up by major publishers, and his short stories were published in three large tomes: Wool, Shift, and Dust. Createspace | 2013 | Paperback | 458pp (lucky enough to get another of his self-published versions!)
Wool (Silo #1) Book Review
Shift (Silo #2) Book Review
In Wool, we are taken to an enormous underground silo where the surviving population has lived for hundreds of years following a forgotten post-apocalyptic event. When the sheriff breaks the rules and is sent outside to clean the sensors, a death sentence, a breakdown in society quickly ensues and a rebellion occurs. Juliette, the mechanic from the deep, arises to the top to take control, but soon finds herself the victim of a heinous plot and is sent to ‘clean’ as well, only to survive and make a remarkable discovery. There were other silos.
In Shift, Howey takes us to the beginning, to the very creation of the silos – fifty of them. A senator’s mad plan to destroy the world before the enemy could do so with nanotechnology comes to fruition, and the silos are built to ensure mankind’s survival. As if the bombs dropping wasn’t evil enough, the man in charge still has plans for more destruction, and it involves the silos. His super-computers create a life and death game of survival but no one knows they are playing.
In Dust, the stories and characters from Wool and Shift merge despite the distance of time. Juliette and her crew from Silo 17 and 18 know that their lives have been built upon lies. First, Silo 18 discovered that there were more silos out there when they always thought they were the only ones. Then they discovered the Silo 1 had the power to destroy any silo with the push of a button.
But in Silo 1, another power struggle is being fought. Congressman Donald Keene had built the silos on Senator Thurman’s behest and when the bombs dropped, he was betrayed. Unlike the rest of the silos, the men in Silo 1 are still alive after hundreds of years because they were regularly put into a deep-freeze sleep and wakened for regular shifts which included maintenance and overseeing of the rest of the silos. Keene, always in distrust because of his initial betrayal, discovered that Thurman’s plans for the continuation of humanity ended with only one silo. The winner of his sick and twisted game. When the air was clean and people could leave the silos, only one would be doing so.
Keene is able to take Thurman out of the picture and forge his identity, taking his place in society as head, and he surreptitiously wakes his sister, an air force drone pilot, in a silo where women are forbidden to be woken. What they discover is that the world outside of the circle of silos might be habitable. The entire dust storm raging outside might be a sham. To back up that theory, Juliette discovers that the air samples seem to be less toxic the further they are from the silos.
To get to the bottom of the mystery, Juliette and Keene need to come together, but that’s not going to happen. She hates anyone and everyone from Silo 1 because of the lies, not realizing that Keene is on her side – not realizing that he had taken Thurman’s place.
What we get in Dust is a non-stop, cohesive story line of ‘go, go, go!’ and I’m happy to say that it was my absolute favorite of the trilogy. While I loved the Wool Omnibus tremendously, especially the first story, it was what it was: five linked but separate stories. They were linear, but the you could feel the separateness of them. Same with Shift – we would go back and forth in time with the stories. Dust felt like one complete novel without separation, but it tied together everything we read about in the first two omnibuses.
Juliette is my favorite character in the series and since the movie rights for Wool have been optioned but casting has not been announced, I want to take this time to tell Hollywood: Michelle Rodriguez. Please. I had her in my head from Juliette’s first mention, her first description. She would do justice to this role.
“She had devoted most of her life to holding that silo together, to keep it running. This was a kindness repaid by the silo as it filled her lungs with air, gave rise to crops, and claimed the dead. They were responsible for one another. Without people, the silo would become as Solo’s had: rusted and fairly drowned. Without the silo, she would be a skull on a hill, looking blankly to the cloud-filled skies. They needed each other.”
We have a lot of tragedies in Dust, some heartbreaking moments when we lose favorite characters. But what it comes down to is the paths we choose to take. Howey is brilliant by infusing main themes through symbolism in each omnibus. With Wool, it was the stairs and a representation of class or hierarchy. With Shift, it was all about power and challenges to that power. In Dust, his theme is ‘making your actions count’.
“Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take – and every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. The trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”
There are several people who give it ‘all’ willingly, the ultimate sacrifice to save humankind and to bring freedom to other silos.
But do they succeed? You just never know with Howey. I guess you’ll have to read the book and find out.
Dust
by Hugh Howey
Tagged: Dust, Hugh Howey, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, science fiction, Silo, Wool
Rebecca Skane
About Rebecca Skane
Rebecca Skane is the editor-in-chief for the Portsmouth Review. She holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Lawrence University in Wisconsin and resides in Portsmouth, NH with her husband and two children. She is the founder of The Portsmouth Book Club which boasts over 1,000 members. She also doubles as a professional escapist. Her genres are scifi and fantasy, both adult and young adult - but she often reads outside of her preferred genres. You can follow her on GoodReads. Aside from her love of good books, she is a professional website developer, content editor, and SEO expert. You can visit her web design and development site at RebeccaSkane.com.
Hugh Howey’s ‘Wool’: The walls are too tight
Posted by: Megan Leigh in Books, Reviews September 5, 2014 0 6,154 Views
I began reading Wool knowing little about the book other than it had roots in self-publishing, was hugely popular and highly regarded in the SF community. I had far more of an awareness of the author, Hugh Howey, from his vocal contributions to the Amazon-Hachette debate and his general support of Amazon and self-publishing more generally. Howey is notable for having self-published Wool before forgoing large deals with traditional publishers in favour of keeping ebooks rights to himself. He has a deal with Simon & Schuster for the distribution of hardcopies of his titles only.
The book’s structure
HOWTRIL05-SLIP-3Wool isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories/novellas that make up part of the Silo series. Howey reportedly set out to only write a short story. Given the success he experienced, he continued to write more stories for the dystopian world he had created. Wool is actually an omnibus/collection of stories that read like a novel, although they aren’t.
There are five ‘books’ that complete Wool: ‘Wool’, ‘Proper Gauge’, ‘Casting Off’, ‘The Unraveling’, ‘The Stranded’. Howey has also written two other titles in the series, Shift and Dust. Shift is a prequel collection to Wool while Dust is actually a full novel in its own right, completing the tales begun in the other books.
Plot
N.B. The easiest way to describe the ‘plot’ without too many spoilers is to treat the Wool omnibus as a novel rather than a collection of smaller stories.
A long time ago the Earth’s atmosphere was poisoned, making it unlivable on the Earth’s surface. A community living imprisoned in a silo underground are the survivors of the devastation up top as well as several political uprisings within the silo itself.
WoolPower within the silo is changing as one Sheriff departs and the Mayor must find a new candidate. The Mayor faces opposition from the IT department who fancy themselves the real power in the silo. But is there more to IT than meets the eye? And why must residents of the silo never talk about the outside or how the devastation of the Earth occurred?
When some rules are broken, dire consequences follow. Citizens are sent to ‘cleaning’ when they break cardinal rules. Cleaning involves being sent out of the silo to die in the toxic air, but not before you clean the visual sensors for the silo so that residents may enjoy the ‘view’ of the outside from safety. When multiple cleanings happen in quick succession of one another, and one ends in the most unusual way, the occupants of the silo must keep an uprising at bay as the truth behind their situation slowly begins to emerge.
‘What we do going forward defines who we are.’
Having no concept of the background of Wool before I started reading it, my perception of the book is skewed. I read it assuming that it was written as a novel rather than a series of novellas, and my reading of it suffered as a result. The setting for the novel is so suffocating that by the end of book five the reader feels claustrophobic along with the occupants of the silo. The story itself also begins to be stifled by physical limitations the setting enforces.
Hugh Howey
Hugh Howey
The protagonists of the first two ‘books’ are different characters, and though we meet Juliette (the main protagonist for the final three books) in the second, she doesn’t become the focus until the third. This shift in narrative focus feels jarring at first, especially given the high fatality rate of any and all characters the reader comes to care about. The fast pace of the first three books isn’t sustainable, however. In the final two books the tale wears thin, as progress and action slows, and it begins to feel like the author is padding it out more than the story warrants.
Like many of Ursula LeGuin’s science fiction novels, Wool is not an ‘idea’ SF book. Instead, the stories are about political intrigue, conspiracies, and power plays. With all the conspiracies playing out over the course of the 500-plus pages, the psychological thriller aspect of the story keeps the reader enthralled – for the most part. The community’s prejudices between the ‘down below’ and the ‘up top’, as well as mechanical vs IT all represent blue collar and white collar differences that are a very real part of our society now, and I can’t help but make connections with Howey’s feelings of self-published vs traditionally published authors. When Juliette, the protagonist for most of the second half of the collection, is taken away from the main action that the political intrigue loses some of its spark. With the direct threats removed from her immediate vicinity, the story loses its bite.
The hype surrounding the Silo series led me to believe that it would be issuing a new era of science fiction writing, I was wrong. While Wool is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, there’s very little that makes this book science fiction. There is little ‘fiction’ to the technology involved or the idea that we could completely destroy our world. The idea is not particularly innovative, though it is intriguing. And while the writing, for the most part, is well constructed, it wasn’t enough to keep me glued to my seat for the full length.
Verdict: A solid effort but possibly not worthy of all the hype it has received. The first three ‘books’ within the omnibus are by far the best.
Related posts:
QUOTE:
The prequel feels claustrophobic and constrictive as humanity is forced underground and force-fed medication to forget the destruction inflicted on friends and loved ones.
More and more layers of the dystopian world are unveiled, enticingly paving the way for the sequel Dust
Book Review: Shift by Hugh Howey
SHIFT is the prequel to Wool, a selfpublishing phenomenon in America that became a bestseller in the UK earlier this year.
By Jon Coates
PUBLISHED: 00:01, Sun, May 12, 2013
Shift by Hugh Howey Shift by Hugh Howey
Author Hugh Howey captured an army of fans after putting a 50-page stand-alone short story online 18 months ago.
This became the first instalment of a five-part novel released in January by the publisher that brought us Fifty Shades Of Grey.
Wool introduced readers to a post-apocalyptic world, with the last humans living in a giant underground silo providing a refuge from the toxic atmosphere of the planet in 2345.
Shift brings the story back to 2049, revealing the decisions taken by a "powerful few" which wiped out billions of people and left mankind teetering on the brink of extinction. The events are told through the eyes of newly-elected US Congressman Donald Keene, who plays an unwitting role in sending humanity underground.
The three parts of Shift move the story forward a hundred years each time to reach the start of Wool, bringing in a familiar character in its third instalment.
The events are told through the eyes of newly-elected US Congressman Donald Keene, who plays an unwitting role in sending humanity underground
Whereas the five parts of Wool became broader in scope and size to match the desire of its central characters to escape the confines of the silo, Shift is brilliantly written to portray the opposite effect.
The prequel feels claustrophobic and constrictive as humanity is forced underground and force-fed medication to forget the destruction inflicted on friends and loved ones. By bringing the story back to fewer than 40 years in the future, Howey creates a starkly believable and terrifying apocalypse.
More and more layers of the dystopian world are unveiled, enticingly paving the way for the sequel Dust, due to be published in October.
Ridley Scott, who directed sci-fi classics Alien and Blade Runner, has already snapped up the film rights to Wool.
After reading Shift, I'm sure a film trilogy could be on the horizon.
Century, £12.99
Verdict: 3/5
Wool by Hugh Howey REVIEW
By sfx January 18, 2013
Wool by Hugh Howey book review : Buy it and you won’t feel fleeced.
In today’s dystopia-crazy book world, the only real surprise about the “underground, enclosed society” subgenre making a comeback is that it’s taken quite so long. Ever since the nuclear paranoia of the ‘50s, SF has regularly explored the idea of humanity having to take shelter underground from a global catastrophe. The nature of the disaster may have changed over the years, but the themes of environmentalism and humanity’s willingness to survive against the odds are all still present and correct.
Now, the subterranean subgenre has returned in an unusual form. Written by debut author Hugh Howey, Wool is one of the latest ebook sensations to be picked up for a traditional publishing deal and a handsome repackaged edition. Naysayers will take this as another sign of the End Of Publishing As We Know It™, but Wool is actually a genuinely fascinating example of ebooks giving an author the freedom to tell a style of story that wouldn’t have happened any other way.
Set some time after a worldwide environmental catastrophe, Wool ’s plot explores life in the Silo – a massive underground society where generations of humanity have eked out an existence, protected from the poisoned world outside. Strict rules govern the Silo, its resources are carefully managed, and its ultimate punishment is exile to the surface - a fate nobody survives for long. However, as a collection of Silo inhabitants start piecing together clues and inconsistencies in the world around them, it soon becomes clear that their history may be a lie, and that finding out the truth means a death sentence…
Originally issued as a series of five ebooks and now compiled together into a chunky omnibus, Howey’s story started life as a short, self-contained novella with a satisfyingly nasty twist in the tail (presented here as the first part of the saga). The positive feedback he got from that initial release led to him expanding the world in four increasingly lengthy follow-ups. With all these combined together, the result is a genuine serial novel that builds episodically, pulling off an impressive number of twists and turns.
Many of these make Wool tricky to discuss without spoilers; let’s just say it’s the kind of story where expectations are regularly up-ended and nobody is safe. Howey uses cliffhangers brilliantly and creates an immersive, engaging story that’s anchored throughout by moody and atmospheric prose. World-building is a vital part of the equation – books like this succeed or fail on the strength of the story’s universe, and Howey gives the Silo a grimy, weathered sense of claustrophobic realism, making it a convincingly real place inhabited by believable, empathetic characters.
Naturally, once the secrets are eventually revealed, the previously ordered society of the Silo threatens to tip into all-out rebellion, resulting in some well-handled action, while the story also raises parallels with today’s environmental problems and our dependence on limited resources.
It’s no surprise that the film rights have been quickly snapped up (as one of Ridley Scott’s many potential upcoming projects). Howey has managed some very accomplished work here for a debut novel, although he does occasionally fall victim to some flaws. The climax is a little too abrupt, while the book sidesteps some intriguing moral questions about power and control in favour of a more unambiguous heroes-vs-the-villains setup.
There’s also the fact that, behind all the structural playfulness, Wool does have a very traditional (and slightly predictable) overall story arc, but ultimately these are only minor speed-bumps. There’s enough freshness in Wool ’s take on the subterranean subgenre to make it more than worthwhile. The end result is a compulsive, accessible journey into a sharply realised and well-crafted dystopian world.
Saxon Bullock https://twitter.com/saxonb
Read more of our book reviews .
QUOTE:
The story is magnificent. Go. Buy it. Read it.
This is a great novel.
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You Are Here: Home → 2014 → June → Sand by Hugh Howey
Sand by Hugh Howey
N. E. White June 15, 2014 4 Comments
Kindle Edition – Published January 9th, 2014 by Broad Reach Publishing
20509356Sand is indie author Hugh Howey’s latest novel. Though it is a post-apocalyptic tale, do not confuse Sand with Wool, his blockbuster series set in underground silos. Sand‘s post-apocalyptic tale plays out on a future Earth where much of Colorado is buried beneath shifting sands.
The story is magnificent. Go. Buy it. Read it. You won’t regret it. Okay, now that I got my obligatory* fangirl praise out of the way, let’s talk about the story.
Original released as a serial, in Hugh Howey’s latest novel we are introduced to a family falling apart after their father left them for a better place. Actually, he left them to find a better place, but nonetheless, he left them. In his wake, his wife, daughter and three sons struggle to make it in a post-apocalyptic Colorado.
The story is set long after a cataclysmic event that left the world filled with sand and wind. The populations in and around Low-Pub (Pueblo, CO), Springston (Colorado Springs, CO), and Danvar (Denver, CO) have re-arranged themselves into shuffling towns that move with the sands. Water is limited, like it always is in the west, but it is made even harder to acquire because of the constantly shifting sands. The old towns (and knowledge) have long been buried and people have devised a way to dive deep into the sands to recover artifacts that can be used up top.
We are first introduced to Palmer. A young sand diver who, along with his dive partner Hap, has taken a job to dive deep. When he reaches his employers camp, far north of Springton and out in the middle of nowhere, he finds out they may be diving for the near-mythical town called Danvar, where unspoiled riches await any young diver brave enough (and stupid enough) to risk going down that far. Together, the two friends make it to the tallest ‘scrapper’, but just barely. Then an unexpected betrayal leaves Palmer to a questionable fate worse than being buried alive.
The next section shifts from Palmer’s story to his two younger brothers: Conner and Rob. These two are waiting for Palmer to come home so they can conduct a yearly ritual that loses meaning with each passing year. In this section, we learn a bit more on how folks deal with the ever-mounting sand, and we get a better sense of their family and why they are at odds from each other. Their sister, Victoria, is afforded her own section next. And I must say, for fans of Mr. Howey’s Wool character ‘Jules’, you will not be disappointed in the strong characterization of both Victoria and Rose, her mother. These women are tough and resourceful. We learn in Victoria’s section that the men responsible for Palmer’s predicament intend far greater harm to the citizens of Colorado than anyone can imagine. The family must come together if they mean to put things right. And among all the sand surfing and diving, a new person enters their lives and changes their course forever. Their is a whole other world out there none of them are aware of and it could kill them all.
This is a great novel. The relationship between all of the members of the family are fully formed. Each are worthy of a piece of your heart. You’ll soon find yourself rooting for each to make it through the next challenge. Mr. Howey’s description of his world of sand is immersive and thrilling. I loved the technology used in the story and how it impacted their lives and the livelihood of each member of the society created. It was both realistic and innovative. The pacing of the story was fast, but I never felt the author skimped on moments to wring out the maximum emotive content in every scene. I really love the way Mr. Howey writes. After reading Wool, his other post-apocalyptic series, I didn’t think he could repeat the creation of a great world setting filled with characters you instantly care about. But, he did.
With that said, I had a major what-the-heck moment about halfway through the book. And then when the final scene came round, I almost dropped my ereader in disgust.
[POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT]
I’m afraid I don’t understand the weather in Sand. It wasn’t fully explained how the jet-stream could reverse its direction. As far as I understand it, the massive air current that runs from west to east never can reverse itself. If it did that, the world would literally be spinning the other direction. Since there’s no mention of that in Sand, I’m assuming that the cataclysmic event that destroyed ‘reality as we know it’ did not cause the earth to spin the other way. Therefore, the entire premise of the novel doesn’t quite make sense. While small local weather events are heavily influenced by topographic features, thus possibly precipitating some rain event moving from east to west, a storm from the east is just not possible – unless we are talking a massive hurricane (which doesn’t seem to be the case). The jet-stream can be influenced by climate change and our weather will change drastically, but nothing can reverse the direction of the jet-stream save the earth spinning in the other direction.
While this didn’t bother me too much, I did finish the book and enjoyed the unfolding human drama, the meteorologist in me wasn’t happy.
[END POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT]
Regardless of my misgivings on the weather in Sand, Mr. Howey has penned another great story with characters you’ll love to fall in love with. I highly recommend this to anyone looking for an adventurous tale set in an imaginative post-apocalyptic setting that touches on familial relationships.
*Obligatory only in the sense that I really think the story is magnificent and you should read it.
N. E. White, May 2014.
Copyright © sffworld.com. If quoted, please credit “sffworld.com, name of reviewer”.
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Book Review: ‘The Shell Collector’ by Hugh Howey
Published on January 20, 2015
Ashley O'Brien
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The Shell Collector by Hugh Howey, Author of New York Times Bestselling Wool Series
www.hughhowey.com
Hugh Howey invents curious, future worlds where people live and work for centuries in silos beneath a toxic surface (Wool, Shift, and Dust). Worlds where people surf over deserts that have smothered cities, diving in as survival warrants the pilfering of long-abandoned wares (Sand). And, more contiguous, where people face the predicament of rising waters and coastlines creeping into the sea.
Okay—so in none of Howey’s worlds would anyone want to live. But once you start reading, you never want to leave. The Shell Collector is set more than a quarter century away on the coast of Maine and in a submerged New York City. It brings the usually speculative and remote welfare-of-your-great-grandkids argument on climate change, to the table. But unlike, say, the hard-hitting image of water that’s “a hand sweeping everything from the table” in Jim Shephard’s “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” Howey’s conservationism here is more subtle. This story is more about the characters—Ness Wilde and Maya Walsh, Holly, Special Agent Stanley Cooper, and a generation of what could be our future grandkids coping with disappearing shores. And because these characters are convincing and realistic, like all Howey’s characters, they have to point their fingers somewhere—the past.
So they place blame on the closest they have: Ness Wilde. Wilde is the CEO of Ocean Oil, and he and his patrilineage of CEOs of Ocean Oil have profited from the rising levels, temperatures, and acidity of the seas for decades. They’ve contributed to countless dying oceanic species while hording their share of everyone’s most esteemed and yet elusive treasure: seashells.
Maya Walsh, an avid shell collector herself as well as a contributor for the Times, is determined to bring to light these wrongdoings—and not just the blood on Wilde’s hands of endangered seashells and marine life. She has the rare opportunity to interview this infamous man, and she dives in. Scuba suit and all.
The Shell Collector is stirring and beautiful. It captures environmental problems and catastrophes we’re familiar with today, especially along the Eastern seaboard, but exacerbated over decades. And yet we see the resilience of humanity through qualities like forgiveness and empathy. The way Howey uses environmental issues as an impetus for actualizing certain human emotions, connections, and insight reminds me of how Karen Thompson Walker did it with The Age of Miracles. In this novel, a slowing of the earth’s rotation affects not only time, sleep cycles, gravity, tides, and animal migrations. It’s more about self-realizations, relationships, and legacies. So too is The Shell Collector.
The science fiction, activism, romance, race and heredity, shelling—none of it is heavy-handed in this novel. Only occasionally does the shelling verbiage get a little too heavy with sozon’s cones and conchs and lace murexes. And only briefly is the romance a little predictable. Overall the novel is an authentic balance and a cohesive, well-researched piece, written in a first-person female voice that’s immediate and credible. Here Howey demonstrates flexibility of narrative and plot as well as shares his personal hobby of shelling he took up while living in North Carolina, and carried over to his current residence in Florida.
And the imagery is unforgettable. Sentences are poignant, drawing us in with, “My earliest memory of the beach is of it being a harsh place for a wheelchair.” Others like, “They don’t belong here, the palms…perhaps these are million-dollar annuals whooshing by”; “No longer beautiful backdrops skirting the city, [the Hudson River and the East River] became a coiled threat”; and “Hey. The story isn’t over yet. Keep reading,” kept me reading. Even through the Acknowledgements.
The Shell Collector is a new genre for Howey. He calls it “something like an environmental thriller romance with a sci-fi dystopian aftertaste.” But once again, he immerses his readers with layers of themes, imagery, and mystery to deliver a story that’s truly profound.
—Ashley O’Brien, Copywriter and Freelance Writer
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Book Review: “Beacon 23” (Hugh Howey)
KC on YA
Reviews
by KC Maguire
Posted on September 1, 2016
beacon 23I usually focus on reviewing books for YA and younger audiences on the blog, but today I decided to share my thoughts on Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey. It’s a book for adult readers, but I think younger readers would have a lot of fun with it. The voice is irresistible and it’s both funny and sad. In some ways it’s a cross between Andy Weir’s The Martian and David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Beacon 23 tells the story of a man whose job it is to stand sentry in what is effectively an interstellar lighthouse, making sure passing ships don’t crash into nearby asteroids. The main character’s name is never given, and the story is told in the first person so it could almost be anyone’s story. It’s very easy to relate to the narrator who is ex-military and living out his retirement all alone in the beacon with only his thoughts and the odd (often wry and hilarious) communications with NASA to keep him company. What I tend to like about Howey’s writing – and this book is no exception – is that, despite incorporating a fair amount of hard sci-fi tech stuff, his stories really are about people: what makes us tick, the nature of our flaws, and hopes for our future. I prefer my sci-fi to focus on the characters than on the technology, although without the tech, it wouldn’t be sci-fi, would it?
The one quibble I have with this book is the ending. I felt it was a little abrupt, and dramatically large-scale in a way that perhaps didn’t best suit the rest of the narrative, or at least the build-up wasn’t sufficient for me to engage with the ending as much as I would have liked to. It seemed kind of quick and convenient (in the sense of a quick way to end the book; very inconvenient for many of the characters!) and I’m not sure that the characters really learned all that they could have about the serious choices before them.
Nevertheless, I’d highly recommend the book. The character’s voice is wonderful, the situations unusual but relatable, and it’s a fast read so if you’re looking for an end-of-summer beach day book, this may be a good one for you.
A bit about the columnist:
Kaleigh Castle Maguire is a wife and mother of three who loves fiction writing and reading fiction of all genres. She has a particular passion for young adult and children's books and is currently working on two young adult novels - one is a science fiction story for girls and the other is a fantasy action adventure for boys. She is a member of RWA, AWP and SCBWI. She loves to blog about books, writing, and to interview new authors when she can get them to agree (which they happily do most of the time). She's also a proud member of the Houston-based Space City Scribes author collective. Visit author page
Beacon 23 – Book Review
Hugh Howey has always had a large fan following. His book ‘Beacon 23‘ has recently brought him much acclaim. The essence of the story revolves around the concept of how lighthouses were used as beacons. That is precisely the way the book got it’s name. However, the beacon that Hugh Howey refers to isn’t on the earth but rather in space.
The story explains to us how people have manned lighthouses with the sole purpose of guiding ships on their path. That however has been a thankless job for centuries that have gone by. In the 23rd century, these men and women find themselves carrying out the same job in space. Many beacons form a network. It is this network that helps ships pass through the Milky way.
The main character in the plot is a man called Digger. He was considered to be a hero and was requested to be a keeper. The keepers job is to ensure that the Beacon functions well. Digger’s story is dark and tragic as he doesn’t believe that he is a hero. He has suffered a lot of psychological trauma due to the war. The story takes many twist and turns which reveals the true depths of Diggers personality and his struggle to ensure that the Beacon functions efficiently.
Beacon 23 was originally separate stories which formed a series. Hugh Howey decided to club them together to form a really good novel. It’s an interesting read simply because the main character (Digger) has a complex personality. His struggles are real. Add in a little science fiction and you got yourself an amazing plot!
The story of a man stranded in space pulls on the heartstrings. This is especially so, because of the way that Hugh has portrayed Digger. He has formed the character to be strong on the outside and crumbling within. Hugh Howey’s prowess with his words makes the book engaging and exceptional!
HUGH HOWEY Dust. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
Tags: Dust/ dystopia/ Hugh Howey/ SFF/ Wool trilogy
dustA huge and occasionally chaotic canvas does not diminish the achievement of this dystopian trilogy.
Dust is the long-awaited conclusion to the saga that started with Wool. If you have not read Wool, or Shift, the previous books in the trilogy, don’t start on Dust (and don’t read this review yet). Sometimes it is possible to glean enough from the later books in a sequence to fill in the story, but not in this case. There is simply too much detail and there are too many characters to get a grasp on the extraordinary richness and complexity of the whole.
In Wool we found a silo that contained many thousands of people – Silo 18, a rigidly stratified and controlled world with no escape and with one of the most chilling and vindictive tricks played on those who were sent to their deaths outside. They walked into a poisoned environment with a visor that convinced them that they were in an Eden, and once outside, they cleaned the windows of the silo in the vain hope that they could convince those inside that they were being fooled by their view of a barren landscape. Metaphorically, there was wool over their eyes. Juliette, a very appealing heroine, defied the brutal death planned for her and set the subsequent rebellion in motion. She was a mechanic – a vitally important role – and a visionary. Her experience of escaping death and finding Silo 17 gave her enough insight not to be a dupe.
Shift was a collection of three novellas that gave us the backstory and explained the reasons why there were so many silos, all controlled by Silo 1. Here we met Thurston, a man corrupted by his arrogance, who had taken it upon himself to construct the future and preserve the world of the mid-21st century on his terms. He feared that a rogue terrorist would destroy the world with nano-technology so he attempted to create a world free from such technology. There were other characters of importance introduced in these books, among them Donald, Charlotte and Anna, who ultimately attempted to stop Thurston in several scenarios. Silo number 17 was home to a few lonely survivors from an earlier episode of Thurston’s use of destructive power. These people also feature in Dust.
Dust is the culmination of the fight for knowledge and understanding waged by Juliette and her supporters. There is much confusion among those who live in Silo 18, who have been controlled by Thurston’s use of various methods of indoctrination. Some oppose Juliette, who is now the mayor; some have religious beliefs that preach submission; others find it hard to believe her version of events. She gleans information through flimsy radio contact with Donald and his sister Charlotte in Silo 1, who have begun to rebel against Thurston, but there are no clear answers given to her, just hints and clues. And she doesn’t trust them anyway.
She engineers a mammoth digging project that connects Silo 18 to Silo 17, home to a few lonely survivors of an earlier use of Thurston’s destructive power: the tragically isolated Solo, who was found by Juliette when she was expelled from Silo 18, and some younger people who also feature in Dust. All her small advances prepare those in the silo for the cataclysmic horror that is pending. If this sounds somewhat confusing, it is probably because the amount of information we are being given here is enormous. Wool was an exciting, fairly straightforward story but Dust seems to have too many details to deal with; all the narrative threads from Wool and Shift are now brought together, but in a rather unwieldy way.
In Silo 18 Juliette fiddles with technical details but the exciting action is with Charlotte and Donald in Silo 1:
His shins hurt from protecting himself from Thurman’s blows. There was a knot on his forearm like a second elbow. And every time a coughing fit seized him, he wanted to die. He tried to sleep. Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient and the dying. Donald was all three.
There is no doubt that Howey is a fine writer.The trilogy is a wonderful epic, full of imagination and skilful invention, but the need to bring so much incident to a conclusion has meant that some aspects of the narrative in Dust are thinly sketched. Juliette and her lover Lucas in Silo 18 are well developed, Donald and Charlotte in Silo 1 are also engaging but many of the other characters are treated too briefly to have much impact. Even those still alive in Silo 17 are sparsely fleshed out – except for the charming child, Elise. However, the drive and momentum of the story carry the reader to a satisfying and truly exciting ending that is full of hope. The trilogy is an amazing tour-de-force and I am still thrilled by the scope of the narrative and the basic premise of preserving humanity through confinement to silos. Howey has an extraordinary imagination and the skill to make his story vivid and compelling. The three books have been a demanding and clever read.
Hugh Howey Dust Century 2013 PB 416pp $29.95
Folly Gleeson was a lecturer in Communication Studies. At present she enjoys her book club and reading history and fiction.
You can buy this book from Booktopia here or from Abbey’s here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
QUOTE:
Even though his heroine suffers painful losses along the way, her tale of survival still has a powerful lift.
Dust review
Kristen Baldwin August 30, 2013 at 04:00 AM EDT
The saga that began in 2011 with a breathtaking self-published novel called Wool comes to a satisfying end with Dust. Mechanic-turned-reluctant savior Juliette is perilously close to proving that her home — a city built in an underground silo, away from the earth’s now-toxic atmosphere — is not the only ”world” out there. Howey’s propulsive narrative metes out all of the answers Juliette (and we) have been seeking: Why were the silos built? Is life outside possible? Even though his heroine suffers painful losses along the way, her tale of survival still has a powerful lift. B+
Book Review: ‘Dust’ by Hugh Howey
By Joanna Cabot -
August 20, 2013
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Hugh Howey“Dust” is the final instalment in indie darling Hugh Howey’s Silo Saga, which began with “Wool” in 2011 and concludes with this just-released title. I picked it up on release day because I enjoyed the previous two volumes and also because Hugh Howey sells his work free of DRM, and I am all for that!
“Dust” picks up where the “Shift” omnibus left off, with Donald and his sister Charlotte hiding in Silo One and trying to unravel the end game for the silo folks, while Juliette struggles as mayor of an untrusting Silo 18. While Lukas, her lover, picks up the slack on her mayoral duties, and builds a relationship with Donald over the radio, Juliette is hoping to rescue Solo and the others in the abandoned Silo 17. Eventually, the two plots collide and things get interesting…
Hugh Howey
Hugh Howey
The book has some beautifully written moments, and I think Howey handles interior dialogue exceptionally well. Several of the characters face the epiphany that meaning well and doing well are not the same thing, and at least one villain from a previous story is posthumously redeemed.
There is a heart-breaking scene where a priest confronts the loss of his flock with a handful of bible pages that could spell either hope or damnation depending on how they are read, and one of Solo’s child friends is delightfully actualized as one of the best characters in the book.
But … I had the same problem with this book that I often do with series enders, and that’s that some of the wonder and beauty and creativity that makes me fall in love with the earlier books gets lost in the frantic race to tie up all the loose ends. There was just so much plot in this book! And sometimes, that meant the character payoffs had to wait.
There was one love story that didn’t really get its redemption until after one of them died, and there were a few major characters who never got their chance to make us love them at all. And some of those were even living at the end of the book! It just felt a little frantic to me.
I’d have liked to see Juliette actually be the leader of these people for a chapter or two before she asked them all to risk their lives for her. And I’d have liked to make time for some smaller character moments too—Hannah’s infant ends the 800-page book without ever even getting a name!
Overall, I’d say this was a fine note to end the series on, and a satisfying conclusion for the “Wool” fans. But as a book in its own right, I felt it was a little too plot-heavy and just not as beautiful as “Wool.”
I rate this one 3.5 out of 5—but with that said, I do think it’s a must-read if you’ve followed the series until this point.
QUOTE:
I really wanted the silo to represent our planet. We live on a giant ball of rock and water, and it's so big that it feels like the resources are limitless, but they aren't. We transmute raw materials into waste, and that will have to end at some point. We also do a terrible job of getting along with our neighbors, even though we're all in this together. So the silo is a microcosm of our world. The story is about real people and real problems. I think that's why it resonates with readers the way it does.
Questions For Hugh Howey, Author Of 'WOOL'
August 31, 20137:00 AM ET
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Petra Mayer
Wool
WOOL
by Hugh Howey
Paperback, 508 pages
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After a varied career as a computer repairman and yacht captain, Hugh Howey turned his hand to writing. He'd self-published several novels and stories when the sci-fi dystopia WOOL, originally just a novella, found sudden runaway success in 2011. Howey found himself writing sequel after sequel to keep up with reader demand — the latest volume, Dust, was released in August.
Over email, Howey describes WOOL as "like the TV show Lost, except with an ending that makes sense. In the world of WOOL, the planet has grown uninhabitable and the remnants of mankind live in an underground silo," he writes. "When the sheriff of this silo leaves in search of his wife, a mechanic from the lowest levels takes his place. And she begins to uncover the mystery of why they're there and what's really outside."
The silos are horrific, but they're also masterpieces of design; built to last, completely self-contained, for centuries. We find out in the second volume that they were designed by a congressman with a background in architecture — do you also have that kind of experience?
Not formally, but I wish I'd been an architect. I taught myself AutoCAD when I was younger and used to build structures out of foam board like I was a real architect. It goes all the way back to grade school when I used to buy pads of graph paper and draw out intricate house plans. I've always wanted to build things, but I mostly just break them and tear them apart. Writing gives me the opportunity to really create. I get to make entire worlds.
I guess the second half of that question is, how did you approach the world-building? What do silo residents do and have that we don't? Or vice versa? And why?
I really wanted the silo to represent our planet. We live on a giant ball of rock and water, and it's so big that it feels like the resources are limitless, but they aren't. We transmute raw materials into waste, and that will have to end at some point. We also do a terrible job of getting along with our neighbors, even though we're all in this together. So the silo is a microcosm of our world. The story is about real people and real problems. I think that's why it resonates with readers the way it does.
Hugh Howey self-published the original WOOL novella in 2011. It has since grown to become a best-selling phenomenon.
Amber Lyda
I really like Juliette, one of the main characters, because she's heroic but believably flawed — hotheaded, hyper-focused — in a way you don't often see with female characters.
I have three women in my life who are all amazingly accomplished and incredibly driven. That drive is the secret to all that they've managed to do with their lives; it is also the source of their few failings. I think I share a lot in common with my mother, my sister and my wife. I look up to each of them and try to be like them, and I also see in each of us the ability to charge right past our destinations. Juliette is like this. We admire her, but we wish she knew when to ease up, when to soften her touch, when to let down her guard.
When I create characters, I don't like to allow their genders to define them. One of the problems I see with a lot of strong female characters in fiction is that their strength seems to lie in displaying a masculine toughness. There is so much more than flexing a muscle or knowing how to kick someone's butt. A greater strength, I think, lies in not wanting to fight at all but to find some other method of resolution.
Dystopias often say quite a bit about the society in which they were originally written. Is that the case with WOOL?
I hope so. I certainly tried to inject some of our times and culture into the work. In a lot of ways, the things I write about are timeless. But then we've had the NSA issue crop up, which makes WOOL appear prescient to some degree. I think we have a conundrum right now in that the standard of living has gone up for most people, but the gap between those standards has widened.
If the poor and the middle class (what's left of the latter) have it better than the poor and the middle class of a hundred years ago, that feels like progress. But if the difference between the top and the bottom has grown apart, that creates resentment. It all depends on who you compare yourself to, what you are thankful for, and how much disparity you can stomach. At the time I was writing WOOL, Occupy Wall Street was going on and the Arab Spring was in full effect. People had had enough. WOOL was written in the shadow of that.