Title: Wool (Wool #1)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
49 pages
I'll review the whole series below at #5. Of #1, I'll say that normally I wouldn't count something this short as a "book," but since #2-5 are of novella or book length, I'll count it.
Title: Proper Gauge: (Wool #2)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
106 pages
Of this one I'll say, what's with the wool motif? Wool doesn't figure much at all in #1 or #2, unless the idea is "pulling the wool over their eyes."
Title: Casting Off (Wool #3)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
122 pages
I'll review the series at book #5. To this installment I say, Okay, "pulling the wool over their eyes" does indeed appear to be the active wool-related image. And I don't buy the narrative of why certain people have wound up in their jobs. Not in this society. But more of that at #5.
Title: The Unraveling (Wool #4)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
166 pages
I will say here that squeaky cute child-voices infuriate me in an audiobook. Just read the book aloud. Don't do extreme voice characterizations. There's a man in this one with a distinct New England accent. Not going to happen in this book's universe.
Title: The Stranded (Wool #5)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2012
254 pages
**SPOILERS**
2.5 stars for the series overall. There are several important flaws that I can't get around. I'm not much of a video watcher, in part because the problems with this series are ubiquitous in film and television. Like Cowboys & Aliens, this moves right along and there's a lot of action, which I'm sure is sufficiently engaging for many readers. However, my pleasure in reading fiction, especially science fiction, is directly related to effective world-building. This, Wool fails to provide.
For example, argon is extremely cold and can cause frostbite even in small-scale industrial accidents. The first danger faced by anyone staying in the airlock would be freezing, not burning. Freezing badly--the boiling temperature of argon is -302.5°F. Since a similar suit made the person wearing it begin to become hypothermic in uncontaminated groundwater, with a temperature far warmer than negative numbers, I expect that even with a homemade (anti-)heat blanket, the person would be highly insufficiently insulated. Next come the flames. We don't know what gas they use, but its temperature is hot enough to sterilize and char portions of a suit--not the ineffective heat tape on the suit, but the suit itself. Wrapping oneself up in a homemade heat shield, even if one's feet are tucked under, just doesn't seem like sufficient insulation. Perhaps it would decrease burns, but I'm not convinced that the exposure described wouldn't roast you in your own juices. As for re-entering the silo, this ranks among the greatest of this character's many irresponsible, community-jeopardizing acts. If she does successfully fight the flames with her homemade blanket, wouldn't that mean that she'd protected whatever was on her suit from the cleansing fires of the airlock? Is it too hopeful to suppose that she'd be smart enough to consider that the airlock is constructed as it is to kill agents of biological warfare? Agents that might help account for the total destruction of, it appears, pretty much everything? Apparently she's not that smart. She has to get home to the silo that exiled her. Why would she think she wouldn't be shot on sight? Also, in the giant bubbling, ashy mess of a human exposed to this airlock, I highly doubt that she would recognize Bernard's diminutive hands.
There's a lot about the basic premise I don't believe. Despite explanations, the cleaning process seems inexplicable, cumbersome, needlessly complex, and wasteful of valuable and perhaps irreplaceable resources. In terms of careers, I thought it quite unlikely that a society that was otherwise so regimented, and that had a system of "casters" and "shadows" (it's Plato's Cave, dude) would choose untrained, unskilled law enforcement personnel from outside the legal apprenticeship track, especially someone who was a very skilled mechanic and thus presumably needed elsewhere. Surely of the thousands (?) of people in the silo, there was at least one journeyman cop. The same might be said of choosing the evil puppeteer overlord's trainee. Shouldn't Bernard already have a shadow, if not several?
I didn't feel much identification with the characters. I found in their decision-making processes some evidence that life in the silos lowers IQ, and I didn't believe most of the decisions made in Silo 17 believable. Really, some ickle orphants clang your manchild companion over the head with his own wrench, concussing him to near-death, steal your gear/clothes/food/water, and cut your air supply while you're an hour below that level and under water so that to survive you have to suck air bubbles from the ceilings of each flooded level of the silo (avoiding the bends, also a neat trick, as is the fact that the bubbles collect on the ceilings, but from above you can stick your knife into what I think is the floor grating to prop open a door); then you chase them up multiple levels (the mere descent of which almost killed your previous mayor and the ascent of which was a source of great complaint by you even when not suffering from extreme exhaustion and dragging said manchild behind you), find the punks hiding with a wee wittle baby, awww, order them to help you, then leave your concussed friend in their care?
This slapdash writing may not bother some readers, but it really bugs me. If I want to read a comic book, I'll read a comic book.
Please don't bother writing a comment saying that I'm nitpicking. I have merely scratched the surface of the world-building and plot issues here, to say nothing of the profusion of wooden yet often blubbery, inexplicable characters. For me, construction of a plausible world with interesting protagonists is the essence of fiction. Without it, I'm only disappointed.
For a much more claustrophobic, and realistic, look at life and death in a post-apocalyptic silo, read Mordecai Roshwald's dated but still classic Level 7. For rousing fights between the levels of a closed environment, with many similar themes and concerns, plus mutants, which is always a bonus, read Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky.
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