"Wool" review - The book "Silo" was based on

 

One of the big surprises of the TV year 2023 was the Apple series "Silo". As I discussed in detail with Sean T. Collins on the podcast, the series impresses with great worldbuilding, strong characters, and great acting performances. The structure of the story and its pacing are also great, in short: highly recommended. I only learned after watching the series that it is based on a book (I should have paid more attention to the credits). This book had a similar story to "The Martian": it originally started its career as an online novel, was then discovered by a publisher, and turned into a bestseller. In Howey's case, it was the first chapter, initially intended only as a short story (and which forms the first episode of the series), that was published online and from which the rest of the book was developed. How it compares to the series and whether it can convince as an independent work will be shown in the following review. Warning: I spoil the story and thus also large parts of the series.

The plot begins with the sheriff (Holston) of the underground silo. After losing his wife three years ago, he is psychologically damaged and declares he wants to go outside. This is a capital crime for the inhabitants of the silo: the outside world is toxic and deadly. Those who want to go outside are sent to "clean": the lenses of the silo's exterior cameras, constantly dirtied by environmental pollution, are cleaned by death row inmates who soon die in the outside world. However, Holston does not believe that the outside world is actually that deadly. Indeed, he sees a blooming landscape outside – before dying in severe convulsions.

Therefore, the silo needs a new sheriff. In his documents, Holston had selected the mechanic Juliette (called Jules) for the position. The silo's president, Joan, undertakes a journey from the top of the silo, where the administrative elite lives, all the way down to the bottom, where the mechanics keep things running. Jules accepts the job on the condition that Joan agrees to an "energy vacation": a partial shutdown of the generator to finally repair it. The government had previously not allowed this for fear of unrest. The unrest does not occur, and the generator is repaired, allowing Jules to soon start her job. However, she immediately has an enemy in the head of the IT department, Bernard, who is both angry at her for stealing heat-resistant tape from IT supplies years ago (because the supplies intended for mechanics were inferior) and does not trust her, and on the other hand, does not want to accept the shutdown of the server infrastructure. Jules, for her part, is no friend of IT, which consumes two-thirds of the silo's energy.

In the following period, Jules begins to investigate Holston's death – and a secret affair from a few years ago. Time and again, people are convinced that reality is not what the silo government pretends it to be. The fact that the president falls victim to a poisoning attack and Marnes is murdered shortly thereafter does not necessarily dispel the impression of a conspiracy. While she tries to shed light on the darkness and manage various class antagonisms, Jules befriends Lucas, an IT technician who, in his spare time, tries to solve the mystery of the bright spots in the sky and draws star maps. As Jules begins to question what is actually happening in IT and whether there might indeed be a conspiracy, Bernard has had enough. The acting president forces her to resign and shortly thereafter arrests her and sentences her to cleaning. Thanks to her strong connections to the people in supply and her friendships in mechanics, Jules owes her life: they replace the intentionally poor material of the protective suits with proper ones, so that Jules can survive the outside world.

It turns out that the helmets of the "cleaners" contain a hologram that pretends an intact world. In reality, however, the world is indeed as deadly and destroyed as the silo leadership claims. The secret is different: there are many more silos. Jules enters a neighboring silo at the end of her oxygen and strength, only to find that no one there is alive anymore. The structure is the same as in her home, but there was a revolt that the entire population fell victim to – at least almost. On her foray through the darkness, she encounters Jimmy, apparently the only survivor, who has been living in the silo for over a decade. With him, she tries to uncover the generator – which leads to an attack by several other survivors.

At the same time, a revolt led by Jules' former foreman begins in her home silo, starting in the mechanics. Since Jules was the first to refuse to clean the camera lenses, the fragile social consensus of the silo is exposed. The rigid hierarchical order is suddenly questioned; the taboo of actively ignoring the outside world collapses. Under the leadership of Jules' old foreman, mechanics plan the uprising and recruit many more people. The insurgents manage to sneak into the supply department unnoticed, which they manage to recruit. The plan is to advance to IT, shut it down, and force Bernard to resign, and then reveal the secrets so that the silo can be informed and democratically decide how to proceed.

In the meantime, Bernard has recruited Lucas, who is to serve as his successor, and has initiated him into the secrets of the silo. Bernard is in contact with the leaders of other silos and maintains order, which is based on a kind of tactical manual that the silos have been following for well over a century to avoid uprisings (as they destroyed Jules' new silo). It also reveals the answer to why the world is actually destroyed: a declining superpower (implied to be the USA) built the silos to save its own society and destroyed the rest of the world. Since then, the inhabitants of the silo have been forced to wait like seed in a silo (hence the name) until they can repopulate the world one day. Bernard explains that he hates the founding generation of the silo, but has no choice but to carry out their plan because the alternative is doom.

The technical superiority of IT, which artificially kept the silo at a lower level, becomes apparent to everyone when the insurgents reach the department. With their improvised weapons and single-shot rifles, they have no chance against the military organization and automatic weapons of IT. Over weeks, IT's troops reclaim floor by floor. During this time, Jules communicates first with Bernard, then secretly with Lucas. When IT's troops clear out the last resistance nests, the mechanics manage to contact Jules via an improvised radio, thereby gaining access to all information.

When the contact breaks off, Jules decides to return with a constructed suit. She intends to use the impending execution of Lucas, who turned against Bernard, as an opportunity to enter the silo through the opening doors. Her dangerous plan succeeds, but she finds that it is not Lucas who is being executed, but Bernard. His own subordinates turned against him in the face of the massacre and lies. The novel ends with Jules as interim president, announcing a thorough investigation and a new era in the spirit of transparency and openness.

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One of the best aspects of the novel (and even more so of the series) is the worldbuilding. The silo is an incredibly believable and vivid place. The absence of an elevator, for example, forces all residents to use a central spiral staircase (a journey of several days if one wants to traverse the entire silo!). This means that the floors have little contact with each other and IT's power through information sovereignty is immense. Many other details are well thought out, both in terms of technical functionality (energy, food, reproduction, etc.) and political organization. This is all the more true for the social-mental consequences; the consequences of a generations-long life underground with the highest priority of resource conservation are more than evident in the stagnation of society and the limited information.

It is not particularly difficult to read the class metaphor between the sections of the silo ("Deep Down", "Up Top"). The uprising of the mechanics can easily be recognized as an allegory for workers' uprisings, and the social stratification is explicitly made by the characters. The structure of the silo leads to an overemphasis of these class differences, as there is hardly any contact between the levels and the social classes largely reproduce themselves, although ostentatiously social mobility is possible. All these aspects make the novel and series a special pleasure for politically interested readers; that Howey refrains from too direct political parallels allows a wide spectrum of possible interpretations and readings from both progressive and conservative perspectives.

As a fan of the series, however, I was disappointed by the novel. The series is actually much better than the book. Despite all of Howey's creativity, he does not succeed in writing a good novel. This is partly due to the characters. They are mostly no more than vessels for plot functions and do not act as particularly interesting persons. The dialogues are functional, the characterization is simplistic. Much worse, however, is the obviousness with which all this happens. While the series preserves the mystery over an entire season, in the novel one learns right at the beginning what happens to Holston, and Bernard appears from the beginning with the subtlety of a particularly soft sledgehammer (which is not improved by the audiobook, in which he speaks with a snarling villain's voice). The character Robert Sims from the series is completely missing, and with him a complete plot thread that made Jules' investigations interesting in the first place.

Many plot developments happen quasi off-page or in passing, whether it's the repair of the generator or the bursting of the investigations. The attempt to give the whole intertextual relevance by naming Jules after a performance of Romeo and Juliet and the (somehow half-forbidden) engagement with Shakespeare is so flat that it falls completely flat. Showing the intelligence of an underestimated character by having him read Shakespeare and simultaneously operating the villains against it is not exactly a sign of great artistry.

The plot in the almost deserted silo and the uprising suffer all the more because there are no characters with whom the reader can build a connection. Often one has the feeling that a non-fiction book would help more than the novel structure, with which Howey does not do too much. The entire strengths of his work are in the world of the silo, and someone at Apple must have recognized that, because the series expands the characters and the plot significantly and transforms it into a small masterpiece, while the novel manages to pull me through the reading with the "I want to know what's behind it and how it ends" – but not much more.