Hugh Howey's DUST

"The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end."

Readers of Hugh Howey's Silo series are by now prepared for a certain degree of bleakness, but there are moments of downright agonizing despair in Dust, its final installment. Moments that made me cry out to my lodger "Who does Hugh think he is, George R. R. Effing Martin?" to which my lodger replied "No, because then you would have had to wait seven years and then you'd only have gotten half the story."

True, true.

I've taken quite a series of emotional beatings at the authorial hands of Mr. Howey as I've read these books. I've come to care deeply about their characters, especially the engineer-turned-leader Juliet and the kid who came of age to become a silo's sysop, Lukas, only to go through the wringer with them as they've weathered bout after bout of horrific social and psychological turbulence. I've come, too, to pretty much despise architect-turned-politician-turned-overlord-turned-half-assed-saboteur Donald, and to loathe his manipulator and master, Thurman. It's fun every once in a while to have clearly defined heroes and villains to cheer and to hiss at.

Which would hint that there's a certain lack of complexity at work in the Silo books, if that was all that could be said about them. But that would be a mistake, because these works are actually all about complexity, about dynamic, chaotic messiness versus imposed order, about the overthrow of a particularly odious form of generational tyranny, about individuals setting out to out-think a system minutely designed to prevent them from thinking at all, except about meeting basic survival needs and keeping running the intricate machine that lets them meet those needs in an environment for which they are evolutionarily ill-suited.

The world of the Silo series has been gradually revealed as one of layers and layers of horror and sadness, albeit one in which families and friendships and the quotidian pleasures of daily life still, in some fashion, prevail. As the Wool and Shift stories have unfolded, the nature of Silo life is revealed as even more sad and horrible than it had at first seemed: the Silos are not merely survival machines, but part of a rather twisted and terrible effort to warp all of humanity to conform to one man's imperial will, a captive breeding program of sorts, to produce perfectly obedient and docile subjects. It's generational tyranny writ large, with the added horror of the original generation still being around to inflict it from afar, enabled by super sci-fi technological advantages denied to the ordinary Silo dwellers. The generation -- the man -- that killed the world still holds the power of life and death over the people he "saved."

But even the most tightly controlled breeding program has its sports, its throwbacks, its tall poppies. Dust is a celebration of those tall poppies; even as some of them get mowed down, the rest stubbornly refuse to conform to the imperial will, to remain ignorant and powerless and acquiescent to the expectations of their masters. Juliet, Lukas and their friends, with a little help from a belatedly aware and rebellious Donald, are determined to think their way out of and around the limitations imposed on them, to turn, if necessary, their elaborate machine for survival into a machine for revenge. Or for liberation.

The tension between the will to revenge and the will to freedom is a major theme of Dust, as Juliet struggles between rage at what she has learned about the nature of her world and hope that she and hers can transcend that world. She has been given strong reasons to yield to either impulse*, and the reader is kept speculating about what she will choose for most of the novel. This tension coupled with that of Howey's vast talent for cliffhangers that are never tacked on but always naturally evolve from situations make Dust a page-turner even for the die-hard Silo fan who is devastated that it's the last of the series and doesn't want it to be over yet.

Meanwhile, Donald's story and character also develop satisfyingly. Belatedly taking on an agency that it's pretty much criminal for him to have rejected for centuries of alternating Shift work and cryosleep,** Donald finally becomes a hero of sorts, though still in a bit of a half-assed way. I will confess to rather enjoying the punishment his new agency earned him, a little. But what really saved his story was the introduction of his sister Charlotte, whom he awakens against all the rules of the master Silo, in which the crew's female family members are kept in cryosleep indefinitely so they don't cause any fights or problems. Charlotte, formerly an Air Force drone pilot, is everything that Donald is not, and it's largely through her, and the need to keep her a secret, that Donald finally gets some steel in his spine, enough to become as important to Juliet's storyline as he is to his own.

Going into Dust, I was really wondering how Howey was finally going to knit Donald's and Juliet's stories into any kind of satisfying whole, especially since he was going to have to do this within the larger framework of wrapping up the series. I'm happy to say he pulled it off splendidly, by letting his characters be who they are, think for themselves, and experience fully the consequences of their decisions (or indecision). Dust is a satisfying conclusion to a powerful and deeply moving series. One wishes Ronald D. Moore had somehow come across Mr. Howey a few years ago. Cough. Disappearing Starbuck. Cough. Howey could have finished BSG right.

He finished the Silo series right. And for that, he deserves all the applause and accolades we may give him.

*And let's just say that it's probably a good thing that she is kept ignorant of one key aspect of life in the master Silo from which Donald (and his illicitly revived sister Charlotte) surreptitiously help her, that of the situation in which members of her gender find themselves -- or would find themselves, if they were ever allowed to awaken -- for the greater good. Had Juliet ever learned of the Senators No Girls Allowed at the Top Because Breeding and Sexual Tension rule, there would have been no stopping her on the quest for revenge.

**Especially criminal since his one-time-girlfriend, the Senator's daughter Anna -- the only woman besides Charlotte to have ever been conscious in the master Silo -- pretty much had to die to finally provoke this agency.

Hugh Howey's THIRD SHIFT: PACT #OneBookAtATime

My anguish-filled love for Hugh Howey's Silo series, aka the Wool series, is pretty well established by now. One of these days, I'm going to have to read his other work, most of which I have acquired in various Kindle-stuffing sprees, but just when my gaze starts straying toward those, Howey spins out more of these fibers and I get all tangled up again.

Yeah, I went there. What? He started it. All that talk of strands and skeins... knitting and weaving, knotting -- and unraveling.

With Third Shift: Pact, Howey has sort of completed his Wool prequel trilogy, Shift, but has also, and more importantly, proven that he deserved every howled expletive I've hurled at him through these eight gut-wrenching tales of his. As in "most heartless bastard since Julian 'Downton Abbey' Fellowes" type expletives. And others.

He's also proven once again, as if he needed to, that he's a consummate pro who absolutely and without question deserves to be called a great damned storyteller.

I wasn't sure if I could expect the kind of neat knitting of Shift to Wool that Howey pulled off here; after all, First Shift: Legacy is set a few hundred years before* the first Wool story, and proceeded at a naturalistic pace, and Second Shift: Order followed this same pattern. Howey could just as easily have kept the two narratives completely discrete and still achieved great things with this series.

But that's not what he did!

Of course, in doing so, he also pulled a Feast for Crows on us (though, thank Bob, we did not have to wait years and years and years for more story), but went George R.R. Martin one crueler, in a way because where Martin just yoinked a bunch of fan favorites right out of AFfC and made us wait another mumble-grumble years, Howey spent the whole of Third Shift teasing us mercilessly** with the prospect of reunion with/continuation of the story of a much beloved character from the original Wool series, and then, like Lucy with her football even more than like GRRM with his dragons, yoinked at the last minute to watch us land with a thud at his feet.

It's definitely a testament to Howey's skill that Third Shift still winds up being a very satisfying read despite this authorial cruelty. Of course a lot of this is because he found so many other ways to put the emotional screws to the reader, such as a Robinson Crusoe-esque tale of a young sole survivor of a silo gone wrong, growing up and going crazy in the ruins of the artificial world the Shift crew created to allow humanity to survive an apocalypse -- a post-apocalyptic post-apocalypse, if you will. And, of course, the continuing saga of Donald, unwitting original architect of the project, and his "shifts" overseeing the whole silo project between long spells in the freezer, suffering a long slow torture of guilt and forgetfulness and discovery of just how utterly he was duped. A passage in which he recalls a visit to Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Museum and freaks out at the internment camp blueprints is especially poignant and effective, if perhaps a little bit too on the nose.

But as you might have guessed, it all ends on a cliffhanger (which Howey himself mocks in a quick aside at the end that challenges the reader to just skip the epilogue. As if), which sets up the next Silo book, to be released soon, Dust.

Thank goodness Howey understands what "soon" means.*** The blogger says, channeling Veruca Salt...

*That "few" is key, because we don't know, reading First Shift, just how far into the past we're going. That it's the origins of the Silo world becomes immediately clear, but what is the gulf of time between the narratives? With the First Shift perps going into cryonic storage, any duration is possible.

**You who have read this novella already know exactly what I'm talking about. How many times did you all but stand up and cheer that [redacted] was on the scene only to find out that, nope, Hugh had fooled us again? Me? Three times. Ooh.

***I kid. Mostly. I do love that he was up front with his fans about a very, very slight delay in publishing Third Shift, because he saw an opportunity to make it a better book and wanted to get it right. The reaction that announcement, from what I saw, was positive -- it would be worth the wait. And it absolutely was. But, Mr. Howey, if you're reading this, and I bet you will, if teasing us with [redacted] so much was the improvement you made while we waited, well, you're not a very nice man.

100 Books #116 - Hugh Howey's SECOND SHIFT: ORDER

After a reader has taken a few of the pummelings that Hugh Howey delivers so very, very well in his Wool/Silo series, one starts a new one with a certain caution that is not unlike the so-called Firefly Effect, I find. One knows going in that one is going to love at least one of the characters passionately, and that one is going to suffer horribly as a result. So the teeth clench, the abdominal muscles tighten and "guard" even as one flips past the title and copyright pages.

Such was my experience of starting, and reading, and finishing Second Shift: Order, the immediate sequel to First Shift: Legacy, and the middle of a prequel trilogy giving us a glimpse of how the world of Wool came to be. I was still reeling from Juliet and her fate when I took up First Shift; I was still recovering from the revelations and the anguish of First Shift when I took this one up.

And so I started reading with my dukes up, yes I did.

So the big questions now, for the purposes of a review* would be 1. Was this preparation on my part justified, i.e., did I wind up taking another pummeling as I'd expected and 2. Did said preparations help, or make it worse?

And the answers are... well, of course it's more complicated than that. Of course!

Second Shift is told from the points of view of two protagonists, whose stories unfold in alternating accounts of life in Silos One and 18. In Silo One, we rejoin Donald, an unwitting engineer of the world of the Silos whose journey from the world we readers know and down into that of the Silos we followed in First Shift -- and whose essential annoying nebbishness this reader totally failed to notice as the horrifying events of that novella unfolded, but whom she really wanted to slap quite often in this one and, retroactively, that one. For Donald is a guy that just lets things happen to him, who doesn't question what he's asked to do until it's too late, and who lets himself be manipulated into making this whole agonizing world possible. In First Shift, he designed the Silo system and seems to have just pretended to himself that it was some kind of intellectual exercise that might see use as a sort of rhetorical weapon in the hands of an authority figure into whose orbit he was drawn by a girl (of course), but never really thought we get used... even after it got built.... And now, in Second Shift, he is one of a small, elite cadre of dwellers in Silo One who are not living the true Silo life but are instead cryogenically sleeping through it, taking turns (Shifts) spending time animate and in charge of making sure all of the other Silos are functioning, technologically and sociologically. And of shutting down Silos that "break down" in one way or the other. Even though there are lots of people inside even the most dysfunctional Silo. And Donald is still pretty much a nebbish. Uh oh.

In tandem and in contrast to Donald in Silo One is young Mission Jones, a blue-clad Porter in Silo 18. He is a new member of what amounts to a guild: the people who haul stuff from one level to another. Computer parts, food, messages, dead bodies, whatever Silo dwellers need transported, the Porters, in singles or in pairs, do the hauling, up and down the endless stairs of 140 levels of underground society. It's an important job, and Mission is proud to do it, even though he knows he will eventually sacrifice his joints to the decades of toil. He also likes being a conduit for and a discoverer of knowledge and gossip, even though very little of what he learns is pleasant or has happy implications. Like the fact that some people on levels far below the Farms near the surface have decided to grow their own food. Or that some people are sneaking their own cargo up and down the levels, either on foot or by means of midnight pulley rigs. People, he finds, tend to resist being cogs in a well-designed survival machine. They don't like being parts that make up a whole. They want to be wholes themselves, independent and free. Which is dangerous in a society so closed and minutely designed and balanced that even an unauthorized glitch of a pregnancy guarantees the erring mother a sentence to cleaning once the child is born. Birthdays are deathdays, after all.

Unlike Donald, though, Mission is an active character in his own story, making decisions and doing things, taking risks and reaping rewards and punishments. The reader gets high on his agency and the mixture of hope and tragedy that make up Mission's very nature (nomen est omen, eh?). Howey gets his hooks into us with this character, oh yes he does. That bastard.

Ultimately, Second Shift is about the quest for forgetfulness. Those still alive who created this world do not want to have to think about, to remember what they did or why, and their efforts to keep everyone else docile and ignorant keep backfiring in tragic and yet horribly predictable ways. Failure and tragedy are always inevitable in this world, which Howey was at great and horribly successful pains in First Shift to show us could become our world with just a little more remote weaponry, a little more population pressure, a little more Tea Partying, and a little less fellow feeling.

But then, he reminds us, that no matter what happens to us, no matter what we do to ourselves, even if we're trapped in Silos below the ground in conditions that mimic, perhaps, those of a generational spaceship**, what we're packing away like so many grain seeds for the future are still people, and they are still capable, within their confined spaces, of great things, of acts of nobility and sacrifice, of lovingkindess and creativity, of demonstrating over and over again that they are worth saving, if those who put them there can just find a way to keep them alive without destroying what they're trying to preserve. If only.

A third volume in this series, Third Shift something, is due out next year. And you'd better believe I'm going to read it. And you'd better believe I'll have my dukes up.

*Though do I really write reviews, really? I'm more into the autobiographical experience of reading a book. But anyway.

**Which really is kind of what these Silos are, except the world they will someday colonize is the same planet they "left" when they went below its surface. Neat trick, that.

100 Books #39 - Hugh Howey's FIRST SHIFT - LEGACY (Wool #6)

I can only start this write-up with a crie de cour that can in no way matches that which this book represents; it's the very likely most anguished thing I've ever read. ARGH! Even so, I tore through it hungrily, just as I did with Howey's earlier Wool work, stunned at its artistry, its elegance, its near-perfection, and yes its anguish. And while it breaks the reader's heart, it hits all the beats that Jorge Luis Borges named as the principles for writing great literature:the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double.

First Shift - Legacy is a prequel to the Wool stories, but really shouldn't be read before them, for a good bit of the enjoyment to be had from First Shift is the explanation for how the confined and close silo-dwelling world of the Wool stories came to be; interesting in itself, sure (for reasons I'll get into below), but so much richer for knowing what's coming and having devoted thought and imagination to wondering about the much-later outcomes and consequences one has seen in those stories.

Once again, Howey has taken up some excellent guiding metaphors and ideas: the politician who performs the ribbon cutting who symbolically takes credit (and responsibility) for a project he had little to do with creating or completing is compelling enough, the exploration of the Ozian fraud behind the curtain as a portrait of the true nature of leadership even more so, but even better is the notion that some outcomes may be completely predictable but not even remotely preventable; all one can do is grit the teeth, accept the truth, and prepare. This is true for the story -- we already know some kind of apocalypse has occurred to create the world of Wool, for instance, and so we know as we take up First Shift that its characters are as doomed as their cities and their civilization. We're ready for a tale of disaster, and we get it, but there's so much more to it than that.

First Shift is a novel with a lot of subtext, and a lot of secrets, but it isn't particularly interested in keeping them. The clues are not hidden, and, as I said, the outcome is already known and inevitable. But even the smaller, subtler mysteries are not posed as puzzles; the outcome of the reader sussing out the truth about the two main characters is predictable but not even remotely preventable; Howey just gritted his teeth, accepted the truth, and prepared, by making their stories so compelling, so emotionally resonant, so completely captivating that the reader doesn't care that the novel's secrets aren't really secrets at all.

I find this utterly masterful.

Instead of secrets, the novel concerns itself with its status as a message in the bottle, a horribly felt apology from the past to the future, a plea for forgiveness for all of the mistakes of history, made to people who will live with their consequences but will never understand them. This is an eerie and heartbreaking thing to be reading in mid-2012 when apocalyptic fears stink up the very air we're breathing and the future looks Idiocratically grim to so many of us.

So this should be a horrible read that I would not recommend to anyone; I should ban it as harmful to the mental health of my readers. But instead, I urge you to take up the Wool stories first, and then have a look at this and see what Howey has managed to do despite the horror and bleakness, because his characters' humanity, compassion, strength, weakness and, yes, humility are very much the kinds of things we need constantly to be reminded of.

It's the bleakest message of hope, and the most hopeful message of doom you could ever, ever find in the bewildering market of fiction that is out there crying for your attention. Because above all, this book is alive.

100 Books #24 - Hugh Howey's THE WOOL OMNIBUS

Since I have been unable to ride my bicycle for a few months, I have taken to climbing the stairs at my workplace from the basement to the sixth floor four times a night for my main cardiovascular exercise. I started out wheezing, out of shape, after just one floor; now I make two climbs to the top in a row each time I take a break from my night gig. I was really, really proud of this until I started reading these stories set in yet another vertical city (c.f. Alastair Reynolds' Terminal World and Ian Whate's City of Dreams and Nightmare), its floor-districts linked only by a spiral staircase, up and down which all goods and services must tramp on human feet on ancient metal stair treads, for some 140 floors. Ow.

Now I feel like a huge, huge wimp. All the more so for having spent hours immersed in the world of Wool instead of my own, eyes glued to the page, butt to various seats, instead of getting more exercise...

A bit of explanation here: The Wool Omnibus is not really this volume's title, more of a descriptor for a collection of short stories, novels and novellas, five in all, that the author later gathered into one book to give his fans a great deal.

For fans Mr. Howey has, and rightly so, for this post-apocalyptic world he has created, in which Earth has become a toxic sewer completely inhospitable to life and what's left of humanity lives deep underground in a vast silo. There are "windows" in this silo in the form of what amount to vast computer monitors that render images captured by a bank of sensors aboveground -- but these sensors get blurry, dirty, exposed to corrosive air and dust storms and all manner of filth...

The wool in the stories' titles refers to the cleaning pads people are given to clean off these sensors every once in a while, and perhaps also to the thick tangle of inherited folk belief and carefully fostered ignorance in which the silo's inhabitants live, for no one knows how long, for how many generations, humanity has lived this way; many don't believe the planet's surface was ever inhabitable at all. And to question the dogma perpetuated by priest and sheriff and IT staff (who function themselves as sort of the ultimate priesthood) is to get sentenced to cleaning, to be packed into a barely functional anti-contamination suit, handed a set of wool pads, and sent outside to clean the sensors -- and die.

These are seriously compelling tales, full of wonderfully imagined characters and a well-envisioned culture with  unique rituals and folkways and mores. Howey has a particularly deft hand with taking up the metaphor of the silo as a vast machine for survival and making it an overarching theme even before introducing his primary heroine, Juliette, a machinist and handywoman with a passion for preventative maintenance and real knack for problem-solving, for following the trail of effect back to cause and fixing what's wrong. She's a completely engaging and wonderfully strong character right from the start, so when circumstances draw her out of her world of generators and pumps at the bottom of the silo and she applies these talents to the (comparatively) larger world, the results are unforgettable. Her story is a marvel of tension and release, of the acquisition of awful knowledge, of misguided fervor and unbearable loss. It's not a terribly uplifting one, but it's a compulsively readable one.

Never have 548 pages gone by so fast for me.

This is (and I only even noticed this as I raced toward the very end of the last novel, Stranded), in part because the prose is damn near flawless; I have seen books coming out of the Big Six publishing houses with considerably more errors. And Howey published these himself, and by so doing has really set the standard for what indie authors should be striving to achieve. Because there were next to no lexical howlers to drag me out of the story, I  became, for a few tangled days, reduced to a thing that wanted to read Wool stories.

And so I read. And rubbed my calf muscles in sympathy with my heart in my throat. And then I went and bought some of Howey's other work, because this guy, this guy is good.