Wool.
WOOL by Hugh Howey (Century)
Digital distribution is having some interesting consequences for the arts. Where once musicians performed in order to be spotted, and subsequently signed to make an album, now they post disaggregated album tracks for free on the web, in order to find fans and be offered high-value live shows.
A parallel, similarly unsettling reversal is beginning for writers: they post free chapters on the web in order to be first acclaimed by fans and subsequently offered the chance to turn those chapters into a physical book. That was the genesis of Fifty Shades of Grey, and also of Hugh Howey’s dystopian fantasy, Wool.
For a writer, bypassing the razor-wire of the publisher’s reader and reaching a real audience has huge advantages. Before Fifty Shades, who knew a voracious audience for a genre recently dubbed “mummy porn” existed? But genre is the terrain where the advantages become, perhaps, more nuanced. Web-posted writing reaches potential readers far beyond those who would seek a bookshop shelf labelled “fantasy”, and that is both good and bad. It breaks the genre silos — but also brings extremely well-worn tropes to new readers who hail them as fresh.
Silos are the subject matter of Wool: vast multistoreyed silos for human survival when a nuclear disaster has rendered the world uninhabitable. Howey’s characters start the book trapped by the idea that their single silo is all there is to the world. Those who question this ideology find themselves among the criminals, lunatics and suicides sent outside to certain death; cleaning the lenses that provide the only view of the wasteland beyond the walls, and opening up a population space for one lottery-winning couple to procreate.
For regular readers of fantasy, none of this is new. The grime, claustrophobia, regressed technology and corruption within, and the poisonous air without, have been the subject of countless tales: Tim Lebbon’s magical Echo City and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 are only two recent examples. Howey writes them well, and some of his characters, particularly the world-weary Mayor Jahns, and Jules, the rebel engineer who is the main protagonist, live vividly even after the book is closed. And although the device is not new, the treks up and down clattering iron stairwells to the various levels of the world are compelling, carrying powerful echoes of stratified worlds all the way back to Dante’s Inferno.
But as the setting opens up, additional characters and plot lines become weaker and more stereotyped. A half-mad hermit and a band of pale, feral children, for example, make obligatory appearances. Jules is given a perfunctory love interest. He is the wizard’s questioning apprentice from a million magical tales, and the cue for lengthy info-dumps of context.
What is most interesting, and most fresh, about Howey’s book is its back story: why the silos were built and by whom. Wool begins a series, and the teaser for Shift, the second volume, brings that to the fore. If Howey can successfully build his bridge between the dystopian future and the American present that Shift signals, his work will be worth the praise it has already garnered.