Reviews

It's unfortunate that I have to edit this review even before I post it. I am not changing my star rating because this is a review on the book, not on the author. But please see the end of this review for a very important warning.

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Hard science fiction is a lot of fun. It helps us examine the world we live in and can teach a lot of lessons about the dangerous sides of science and technology. Wool takes up the challenge of shining a spotlight upon one of the possible terrible trajectories of modern civilization.

The book takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, although it's not originally stated how the world might have become ruined. The air is toxic and hot, able to chemically destroy exo suits in less than an hour, meaning no one can go outside. To solve this problem, it seems some part of civilization built what's called a "silo." This is a deep 140-some-floor bunker that holds the last bastions of humankind within.

So the silo contains everything the population needs to live. It's completely self-contained, including farms which grow the necessary materials for textile production and food, hospitals, entire floors dedicated to shops, waste processing and water treatment plants, and a mine for oil and other raw materials. The world is well-built and plausible, although a few liberties are taken here and there. It all still falls within my ability to suspend any disbelief.

Wool started out as a short story, which now makes up the beginning of the longer-format novel. It sets up expectations, defies those expectations, and then ruins everything in a deliciously heartbreaking fashion. Even though I kind of saw the end of the short story coming, it was still amazing to see it all play out, and left me excited for the rest of the book.

The book originally presented as a sort of whodunnit murder mystery where the victim was the planet itself. I looked forward to seeing how various clues and reveals would play out through the narrative, and over time, more and more was revealed. Good guys and bad guys come into the story organically, and sometimes they aren't always exactly what they seem. Although not written in an omniscient third person perspective, there are enough points of view where sometimes the reader becomes privy to information that other important characters lack.

I really wanted this book to maintain that mystery vibe throughout, where the characters would slowly pick apart the horrors of their past and eventually learn the truth of what happened and why the silo came into existence. But, unfortunately, I reached a point in the book where the hard turn into action/adventure territory hit me like a semi truck, and I realized a lot of the narrative was missing a pretty critical logic component that made some of the story confusing. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, though, so let me go back just a little.

To be clear, up until this point, Wool was a five-star read for me. Although not character-driven, the characters were likeable, and their side-stories added life and warmth to the otherwise cold world. The promise of solving the mystery kept me turning the pages, and I really felt like each time I got a little more information, it was a rewarding experience. There is some talk about a past uprising (and indeed, the possibility of MULTIPLE past uprisings), but the population of the silo does seem happy.

At no point are the residents presented as being unhappy, distressed, poor, diseased, hungry, thirsty, or destitute. There are no homeless or impoverished. While there are some bad actors, there's no widespread abuse of the population. It seems (although the worldbuilding didn't go into this much) that everyone is paid fairly, the children are well-educated, and class mobility is as easy as requesting to go elsewhere. This isn't a dictatorship where the people are crushed under the boot of a tyrannical despot, and it's established very early on that the world is, indeed, very toxic and a mass exodus from the silo would be suicide.

Talk of what happened outside, or even talk of going outside, is forbidden. It's the one thing that causes you to immediately be sentenced to death if you do it. If you talk about the outside world, you are sent to "cleaning," which means you're forced to go outside wearing a not-so-durable exo suit where you will clean the sensors providing an image of the outside, then you will be forced to wait for the seals on the suit to break down, at which point you'll die. Everyone sent to cleaning says they won't clean the cameras, but they all do.

Minor spoiler (I say minor, because the reason behind this is revealed early in the book) but when people are sent to cleaning, an images of a beautiful world with blue skies and sun is projected onto a screen located inside the helmet of their suit. They believe the sensor images they see inside to be false. So these people clean the sensors as a sort of "fuck you" to the people who cast them out.

There's just enough time to do this. As soon as they start to walk away, the heat tape on the suit fails, the screen shuts off, and they rip off their helmets only to find that the world is, indeed, grey and dead.

This is a GREAT premise for the short story. It doesn't work with a longer story as written, though. And I began to realize why when the silo's population started a new uprising.

This broke me out of the mystery and forced me to think about why this might have been happening. As I thought about the questions this proposed (and then as I continued reading to the end of the book) I realized there simply was no reason at all to keep this entire population in the dark about why they were in the silo. Yes, even when--no spoilers here--I reached the end of the book. The secretive nature of the... I guess I'll call it the "ruling class" made no sense, except as a club of some sort. Further, the threat of "cleaning" is used as a punishment to keep the people from talking about the outside world, but there's absolutely no reason that people who are sent to clean couldn't potentially just... come back. It never had to be a punishment.

The threat of cleaning did work in the context of the short story, but expanding from there just made it a little unbelievable.

Then there's the uprising itself. I found it pointless.

With no need to fight for better class conditions and with it being impossible to leave the silo, there was nothing to rebel against. The air outside was poison, and clearly the people within the silo were living decent lives despite it. For a while I wondered if this was a thinkpiece about how sometimes people prefer the illusion of freedom at the cost of their own well-being, but it never presented as that, or resolved in that manner, either.

The people revolted knowing that lives would be lost, and yet there was no goal. They started fighting for what I consider to be a non-reason, where a ton of leaps of logic would have to be made to get them to that point.

Again, I was so happy with the mystery being solved through environmental storytelling. I found myself hoping for the discovery that some uprising in the past when people went outside nearly killed the entire remaining population of the world. I hoped for the main characters to find a forgotten treasure trove of information, which maybe could have been found by following clues left in the past my long-dead residents of the silo.

But Wool pivoted into action/adventure territory, and the book lost the charm for me for a long stretch in the middle. And I could never put together the pieces of this uprising puzzle to make it all make sense. The rebellion had no end game. It didn't hope to achieve anything.

If the point WAS to be a social commentary, then Wool does a piss-poor job of pacing it, because by the time the revolt happens, it's not what I want. I found myself skimming through all scenes depicting this uprising to get back to the characters who were unraveling the silo's mystery. I cared about the world itself as a character, and I wanted to know how it all got that way.

For a while, I thought I was going to be leaving a three-star review on this book. That would have been tragic, because it started so well. To the entire uprising plot-point I say: If the point of the book was to be about gaining independence from the ruling class, it should have been set up that way from the start, not dropped on the reader in the middle. It almost became a completely different sub-genre.

I am glad to say things improved, though, and questions did eventually get answered. The narrative soon shied away from the uprising and back to the characters, who were once again deciphering the mystery. And I won't want to give anything away here, but I can say that the answers and the end of the book were very satisfying, to the point where I added a star back onto my rating. Even so, even the reveal on why the world became so toxic does not justify why it was a huge secret from the people who lived in the silo. If they knew, I don't think it would have affected their day-to-day lives. I'm sure people would have had some pretty strong feelings about it, but there are generations of people living in the silo so far removed from the original inhabitants and their world at the time that there's no one to direct those feelings toward.

Like I said, making it so no one really knew the answers (IE: no one was "hiding" them to "keep the peace) would have been a much better way to go. Taking out the uprising and placing that exclusively in the past would have made the pacing better. Then, having someone from the past plant clues so someone in the future could know the truth would have tied everything together so well. The uprising just added too much unnecessary drama.

In the end, though, Wool is still a great story. I'd love to read more books like this, where the world might be in shambles, but the surviving people are generally pretty happy and taken care of. It's a nice take on the post-apoc genre, which is usually filled with people fighting to survive. Anyway, would recommend. Go read Wool now.

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After reading and writing the review for this book, I did discover that Howey does support generative AI. Over the past two years, I have watched this technology destroy careers and ruin almost all motivation for artists and writers to work in their field. This isn't just hypothetical... It's a very real problem that has been plaguing our community since tech companies decided to push it.

Not only does it take from artists, though, it is extremely detrimental to the environment, using four to six times the amount of water used by a developed country like Denmark in a single year. It also uses so much energy that we're still trying to figure out the waste, but suffice it to say, it's a lot.

I am not here to tell you whether or not you should purchase Wool, but it would be a failure on my part if I didn't disclose this about the author. Use your best judgement.

greatlibraryofalexandra's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

enjoyed this book and will finish the series. I liked a lot of the sociology in it, but there were also times where I found it quite cringe-y and couldn’t help thinking that it was So Clearly Written By A Man.

I think it’s unique and cool that so many men cry openly in this book, because men’s emotions should be embraced and normalized, but Howey seems to have no other way to express emotion than staying that someone was sobbing or crying. It’s not convincing.

Often, the interpersonal relationships felt flat, disingenuous, and slapped together in a hamfisted way that was more of an attempt at general crowd appeal than anything else. I wasn’t a fan of Howey’s writing, either. How many times can one man use the word “Brackish”?

Bernard was a pretty cartoonish villain, and Lukas was just a flat out weak character all around.

I’m interested in the story, but I also think it’s useful to note that I wrote in the margin that it coils have worked better as a short story, and then later found out it started as one. It also has strong “Divergent” vibes, in a very weird way.

Not in a rush to finish, but intrigued! This will likely end up being a series I prefer the TV version of.

scireader's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

suzyjjackson's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful inspiring mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Enjoyable story. Felt a bit piecemeal at times with the first part being most engaging, but now I know they are a collection of stories that makes more sense. Keen to see where it could lead as it's hard to see how the story could be resolved given the situation they are in.

shirleyleng's review against another edition

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adventurous medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.5

shan198025's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

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