Monday 11 March 2013

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013

Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

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