Wool

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I read the omnibus version, picked it up for a cool $1.99, although having read it now, I would willingly pay the $5.99 that it is usually sold for. Anyway, the Wool series so far is made up of five smaller stories of varying lengths from short story to novella in length. Put them all together and it makes something roughly the size of a novel.

The wool stories all take place in a post apocalyptic world, where the surface of the Earth is toxic, and the remains of humanity is stuck underground in a massive silo in order to survive. However, as you can imagine, life stuck inside a silo is not particularly suited to human flourishing. The “powers that be” are not who everyone thinks they are and most of the social constructs (eg, being sent to clean the silo sensors, high costs for electronic communication) have been designed by the silo progenitors with manipulation and crowd control in mind. Broadly, the 5 stories that make up Wool follow events in the silo that are set in motion when a mysterious computer program is discovered, revealing that all in the silo is not as it seems.

The short of it is that I loved this book! The only thing that kept me from giving 5 stars was some pacing problems that sensed in the last story. The last book turned out to be a lot of exposition an explanation which, while it fulfilled my desire to know more about the world of Wool, it dragged the plot pace, distanced me from the story a bit, and I think detracted from the emotional payoff of the climax/resolution of the pentology (pentad, pent something else?).

Two things I love in a science fiction yarn are a creative world, which includes both elegance of description and plausibility, as well a sense of mystery or maybe a better way to phrase it is “secrets yet to be revealed”. I've seen this done very well before, and Wool is no different. Howey gets both just right. Its like Howey makes his characters fight for every piece of his world that he shows them and by extension the reader. Not in the sense that Gene Wolf does (where the narrators are always suspicious, and 90% of the plot can only be figured out by extrapolating on small textual clues), but in the sense that Howey's characters go through a lot of grief to earn every piece of information that the reader gets. While I can imagine a scenario where this kind of tension filled plotting can be frustrating to a reader if taken too far, Howey did it just right and I felt a visceral satisfaction whenever a particularly large part of the puzzle fell into place.

The characters themselves were ok. I liked a lot of the side characters (Knox, Solo, Walker) and the main characters from the first two stories (Holston, Marnes and Jahns), I kind of felt that Juliette and Lukas, who are the protagonists in the last three stories, were a little bit cookie cutter. I also felt that Lukas was a little bit whiny and sometimes irritating and not necessarily well suited for Juliette or as the primary love interest in the latter portion of the book. Anyway, the important pieces were there so I did indeed engage with even Lukas and Juliette, and since for me, this book was more about exploring the post-apocalyptic setting than identifying strongly with the characters, I didn't think it detracted from the experience very much.

In summary, if you like a post-apocalyptic mystery, you can't go wrong with Wool. Its action-packed and sinister mysteries abound!