Y recently read the first five books of Hugh Howey’s Silo science fiction series translated into Mandarin Chinese. She recommended them to me. So, I began reading Wool and didn’t stop. This was the first full series that I’ve read straight through since falling into J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series during the winter break of 2016-2017.
I worked through the first five books, then the prequels First Shift: Legacy, Second Shift: Order, Third Shift: Pact, and the latest novel Dust. Then, I read the tangential short stories, “In the Air,” “In the Mountains,” and “In the Woods” (these latter three stories are tragedies piled upon tragedies).
They are all page-turners. There’s plenty of loss and a little bit of hope. There are some interesting ideas at play in the series, including social and organizational psychology, medical applications of nanotechnology, warfare applications of nanotechnology, dosing of populations with trauma/PTSD drugs to facilitate mass amnesia, human hibernation with cyronics technology, and information technology’s omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent role.
I’ve heard good things from others that the Apple TV+ Silo television series based on Howey’s stories, but I haven’t watched it yet. I can say that the books are engaging and worth reading if not for the ideas that they grapple with, then for the characters whose lives are shaped and controlled by those technologies.
