Book Review: Silo Series

Rating:🐑

The Silo series is a collection of three books by Hugh Howey: Wool, Shift, and Dust. They collectively form a post-apocalyptic Science Fiction tale of reasonable quality. Spoilers ahead!

In the world of Silo, humanity, on the brink of weaponizing evolutionary nano-technology that would likely wipe out most of life on Earth, a few morons in America decide to preemptively murder everyone save about half a million people spread across 50 massive underground silos. There they live semi-primitive, repressed lives in a caste system while their worthiness to be humanity’s long term successors is evaluated over the next half millennia.

The storytelling is at its best when it’s driven the by unique set of characters of the different silos, each operating with limited information and diverse life experiences and playing off one another in interesting ways. Juliette and Solo/Jimmy’s friendship is compelling. Jimmy and Shadow the cat’s passage was beautiful. Sheriff Holston’s story is the best of the bunch. Thurman makes a good, plausible villain.

At its worst, the book drags through sections covering people I just couldn’t care less about. Donald is such a useless, despicable, toothless fool. I get that he’s supposed to be portraying the average human “just doing their job” in the face of bureaucratic fascism, and he’s supposed to be redeemed at the end, but I just couldn’t stand to hear about how much he struggled with this hard work project, and then how much he missed his wife, and then how guilty he was for killing Anna when Anna was the only woman who loved him and wanted to help him, and how much pain he was in all the time, yadda yadda. I just couldn’t get on board.

Lukas and Juliette’s relationship was bit implausible, and I didn’t really feel anything when he died. The few page subplots at the end about how religious cultists were marrying off children and burning books seemed out of place.

The other issue I had with the books was that Howey clearly wanted to showcase a Weir-level of hyperrealism that just didn’t work for me. “What would it BE like to put on and remove one of the cleaning suits in fine detail?!”. That’s not actually what is important to me.

I think in many ways, Silo might make a better TV series than set of novels, although I haven’t actually watched the TV adaptation. A tighter storyline with more “show, don’t tell” opportunities that acting allows for could provide a punchier set of betrayals and reveals than the books.

Overall, I liked the books fine. I think they had some original ideas and told some of them well. But the writing style and varied effectiveness of the characters left me a bit dissatisfied.