Wool

Wool. I picked up this book after watching the dystopian, neo-noir thriller "Silo" on Apple TV. It's a story about inhabitants of a ruined world living in an underground bunker called… The Silo. To me the story is heavily reminiscent of the video game Fallout. As a teenager I sunk hours upon hours into that game, feeling deeply immersed by the world building, characters, and Atom Punk genre. That connection was a major reason Wool was able to suck me in.

Having watched the show before reading the book I had some high hopes. The show did such a good job with theming which made reading the book really easy to visualize. One of the best things about the book is the immersion. The world feels lived in. Though it's fiction, it feels realistic. It's easy to see how a chain of events could lead to something like the Silo existing. The people and characters feel motivated. We get a lot of POVs in this book from both main characters and side characters, and even though the POV jumps the plot continues to flow easily.

To be clear the book is not perfect. A reader can tell that this is Hugh Howey's first book. The first 150 pages are especially rough around the edges, with overly complex dialogue and descriptions. I also found the villain to be a bit weak in his motivation. At times it felt like there were villainous actions just for the sake of being evil. Towards the end of the book we get a bit of justification for the big bad guy but it's still a bit hard to fully rationalize.

A big surprise to me was that the full season of the TV show (10 hours) only covered 200 pages of the book. That's less than half of the total 500. The second half of the book is much better than the first, so I found myself questioning why the show really shined. I think the show really deserves some credit for taking the time to flesh out the world, something that wasn't missing from the book but could have been improved nonetheless. Little backstories, side plots, new characters all filled in the gaps. This is really a rare thing in today' television where producers are looking for the big shock value plot points. But what makes those plot points shocking is the methodical build up of tension. I believe that's why so many people argue that "the book is better" when talking about their favorite franchise. Books just have more time to be methodical. Only in the case of Wool and Silo it's flipped.

What makes me really excited for the future of the TV and book series is that Hugh Howey made BIG improvements as the book went on. Consider this: the first 150 pages took me over a week to read, but I read the last 350 pages in 3 days. For all of the misgivings in the first half of the book, the second half makes up for it. The second season of the show can't come fast enough and the second book is high on my list.