Book Review.
Wool by Hugh Howey and the Future of Publishing.
Sorry this is so late tonight guys, I left my wallet at home when I went to Soccer training tonight so I had to double back afterwards to get some food which ended up just killing a lot more time than it should have.
Wool by Hugh Howey is an interesting book on two levels, on one it is a decent enough Sci-fi story set in a dystopian future where the last survivors of the human race live underground in a huge multistory silo where everything is just a little bit wrong. The only window into the outside world is a video screen on the top floor which shows a camera feed from outside the silo. The feed shows a hill and a broken city behind it in the distance, whenever someone talks about maybe going outside they're arrested, put in a hazmat/spacesuit and given some tools to go and scrub the grim off of the camera and then they die outside as whatever it was which makes the outside world so dangerous literally eats away at the suit and then kills them.
The title is from the tool they're given to clean the camera a small bit of wool to wipe it clean and the story starts with the current Sheriff of the silo being sent outside after becoming too depressed and unable to cope with the death of his wife who was also sent outside to clean and the fallout from his death and his new replacement sheriff causes chaos throughout the silo.
Wool, a hit e-book and paperback.
What is also interesting is that the book started out as a short story which forms the first few chapters. I often complained in my writing class a few years ago that everyone was just writing the first chapters of a novel instead of a short story whenever assignments were handed in(and I stand by that)
The scope of the story grows through the characters and the setting remains mostly static for the course of what goes on. The characters are interesting with some flaws in the writing(namely that one of the characters is so great that everyone wants to be her friend a trope which I've always hated because it is usually done to show the bad guy must be really really bad because he hates someone who is so loved and usually hates them for an irrational reason) as well as the small world issue common in first time novels(the main character meets a guy twice randomly who later is made an apprentice to the head of the IT department and thus becomes vital to the plot and an essential ally in her quest) including my own attempts at a book(seriously the number of times my main character meets the same two ambulance drivers is stupid but I like the characters so they stay no matter how annoying). I did like that the novel and its sequels included a set of questions for discussions for book clubs and reading groups, this is an idea I've not really seen much of and I like it. The series opened up a lot of questions and often seemed to cop out of answering them by solving them "off-screen" which I found very annoying, the first book doesn't do this very much but the last one did it a few times which I think was mainly to streamline the story but it left a lot of things dangling.
I liked that the first segment of the book followed the deep inner turmoil of the main character the Sheriff and was followed up by the search for his replacement which involved the Mayor and his Deputy walking down the stairs to the bottom of the Silo to recruit an engineer to be the next Sheriff, this allowed the book to show the set-up of the silo better than just doing an exposition dump as well as allowing
Now I don't really want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the book so if you haven't read the book you should probably stop reading this review here and skip what I'm going to say until you get to the second horizontal line where I'll talk about what makes this book especially interesting from a publishing perspective.
SPOILERS.
The premise of the book is twisted about halfway through when the reader is told that there area actually multiple silos and that the story is set in just one of them. The silos themselves were part of an insane plan to save the planet by wiping out the rest of the world's human population and then leaving the remaining people underground for about a thousand years or so so that the knowledge of the technology(weaponised nanotechnology) used to wipe out everyone would be lost forever and the human race could start again fresh. The fact that it is nanotech isn't revealed until the second book Shift, I've read the entire trilogy and found that unlike most books written as unplanned follow ups these books generally hold up a lot better than they should.
The other silos provide an interesting contrast from the activity in the main silo, the main silo, Silo 1, is where all of the various Silos report to and is nominally in charge of the entire project which was the brainchild of some insane politicians convinced that the world would end soon and so they built a way to protect themselves and some of the human race and then wiped out the rest of the planets life in one swift move. Kept alive by nanotechnology and cryogentics and working in shifts every few hundred years these people are the most dangerous characters in the series as they remember the world left behind and lack the ignorance of history which the people living in the main silos are able to cling to for support.
The fact that there was a revolution in some of the outer Silos which deactivated their self-destruct buttons and chose to live on their own in their own way was fascinating but never explored because in the third book they're destroyed by a drone strike off screen, the exodus of hundreds of refugees across the ground and out towards the cleaner air which they knew was close should have been a lot more interesting with the characters walking across and in front of the various other Silos cameras and likely setting off revolutions and riots all over the place but instead it isn't even a footnote.
My biggest gripe was something which reminded me of the book Enders Shadow, where a conversation seen in the first book is explored more deeply from a different perspective in the next book and the difficulty in making a character who isn't like they were previously say the same things they said in the last book while trying to hide the fact that what they're saying doesn't fit with the character we know now.
My other problem with the first book was that the main character really didn't do anything of note in the first book(she stepped up a bit in the third book and the second one). It was all the people around her who actually did most of the work of the story on her behalf, fighting her wars for her, attacking her enemies, building her the means to escape etc. If she had died halfway through the book the ending would have not been much different at all, actually she did talk to another character a lot which caused him to have a change of heart about the way things should have been done in the Silo but that still doesn't really change all that much of the story.
Aside from those small grips I really liked this book, the setting, the mystery, the characters and the story all served to create a memorable first novel from a promising first time author. There is a bleak
What makes this book all the more remarkable is the path which the author took in writing it, he started out writing a short story online(the opening chapters) and then when people said they liked it he expanded it outwards and onwards creating new characters and concepts and expanding the story as well as letting fans write stories set in the same universe and getting direct feedback from them about elements of the story and adjusting his work accordingly.
He self published it on Amazon and then when it started selling well and gaining some serious buzz he was approached by a publisher to publish a hard copy of the book and by extension the rest of the series as it came out. He agreed but he kept the rights to the digital version for himself and was paid half a million dollars for the print rights.
This book and 50 Shades of Grey seem to be the first of a wave of digital book success stories with authors creating content online and working to get their stuff out there and finding increasing chances of success as the marketplace changes. Matthew Reilly, author of Ice Station started off by independently publishing his first novel Contest(set in the New York Public Library) and then had it noticed by a publisher who picked him up afterwards, this was before the internet really gave people the option of publishing and distributing online and before Kindles and tables became as popular as they are today.
Wool and books like it represent a slow but eventual shift in the publishing world as online stuff grows. The downside is that terribly written stuff like 50 Shades of Grey will occasionally slip through accidentally like Snakes on a Plane, the upside is that authors are connected to their audience like never before and can get better feedback than they would have at any other time in history. Wool is for me the start of this trend and I'm looking forwards to where it ends up, even though I don't read e-books as a rule.
My Day.
Well I submitted this at 8am on Friday so my day yesterday was not all that interesting. I got up in the morning and looked after my brother before making him some breakfast followed by some dinner for the slow cooker, I then went home to get some shoes and then into the city to get some comic books, after that I went back home for about ten minutes before heading out to Soccer training. Training was pretty good, just six of us there tonight. I think I need to start writing down what I think I need to improve upon in each game once the game is over so I can find stuff to work on in training because we tend to be a little bit aimless most weeks, we usually just have a kick-around and then some drills. It isn't hard but it isn't always essential stuff we need for the games.
Once that was over I came home and was going to start writing this review but I really didn't feel up to it for some reason, I think I'm getting a bit burnt out on writing so much every day. Last year I had a few days where I didn't write very much at all and I'm thinking I might need such a break this weekend. I'll see how I'm feeling later. I ended up re-watching Orange is the New Black until about 4am and then started writing. I'm pretty sure I've ruined whatever chance I had of getting back on a normal sleep pattern now. So yay for me!
YouTube Video of the Day.
The world needs more HR experts.
Sorry this is so late tonight guys, I left my wallet at home when I went to Soccer training tonight so I had to double back afterwards to get some food which ended up just killing a lot more time than it should have.
Wool by Hugh Howey is an interesting book on two levels, on one it is a decent enough Sci-fi story set in a dystopian future where the last survivors of the human race live underground in a huge multistory silo where everything is just a little bit wrong. The only window into the outside world is a video screen on the top floor which shows a camera feed from outside the silo. The feed shows a hill and a broken city behind it in the distance, whenever someone talks about maybe going outside they're arrested, put in a hazmat/spacesuit and given some tools to go and scrub the grim off of the camera and then they die outside as whatever it was which makes the outside world so dangerous literally eats away at the suit and then kills them.
The title is from the tool they're given to clean the camera a small bit of wool to wipe it clean and the story starts with the current Sheriff of the silo being sent outside after becoming too depressed and unable to cope with the death of his wife who was also sent outside to clean and the fallout from his death and his new replacement sheriff causes chaos throughout the silo.
Wool, a hit e-book and paperback.
What is also interesting is that the book started out as a short story which forms the first few chapters. I often complained in my writing class a few years ago that everyone was just writing the first chapters of a novel instead of a short story whenever assignments were handed in(and I stand by that)
The scope of the story grows through the characters and the setting remains mostly static for the course of what goes on. The characters are interesting with some flaws in the writing(namely that one of the characters is so great that everyone wants to be her friend a trope which I've always hated because it is usually done to show the bad guy must be really really bad because he hates someone who is so loved and usually hates them for an irrational reason) as well as the small world issue common in first time novels(the main character meets a guy twice randomly who later is made an apprentice to the head of the IT department and thus becomes vital to the plot and an essential ally in her quest) including my own attempts at a book(seriously the number of times my main character meets the same two ambulance drivers is stupid but I like the characters so they stay no matter how annoying). I did like that the novel and its sequels included a set of questions for discussions for book clubs and reading groups, this is an idea I've not really seen much of and I like it. The series opened up a lot of questions and often seemed to cop out of answering them by solving them "off-screen" which I found very annoying, the first book doesn't do this very much but the last one did it a few times which I think was mainly to streamline the story but it left a lot of things dangling.
I liked that the first segment of the book followed the deep inner turmoil of the main character the Sheriff and was followed up by the search for his replacement which involved the Mayor and his Deputy walking down the stairs to the bottom of the Silo to recruit an engineer to be the next Sheriff, this allowed the book to show the set-up of the silo better than just doing an exposition dump as well as allowing
Now I don't really want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the book so if you haven't read the book you should probably stop reading this review here and skip what I'm going to say until you get to the second horizontal line where I'll talk about what makes this book especially interesting from a publishing perspective.
SPOILERS.
The premise of the book is twisted about halfway through when the reader is told that there area actually multiple silos and that the story is set in just one of them. The silos themselves were part of an insane plan to save the planet by wiping out the rest of the world's human population and then leaving the remaining people underground for about a thousand years or so so that the knowledge of the technology(weaponised nanotechnology) used to wipe out everyone would be lost forever and the human race could start again fresh. The fact that it is nanotech isn't revealed until the second book Shift, I've read the entire trilogy and found that unlike most books written as unplanned follow ups these books generally hold up a lot better than they should.
The other silos provide an interesting contrast from the activity in the main silo, the main silo, Silo 1, is where all of the various Silos report to and is nominally in charge of the entire project which was the brainchild of some insane politicians convinced that the world would end soon and so they built a way to protect themselves and some of the human race and then wiped out the rest of the planets life in one swift move. Kept alive by nanotechnology and cryogentics and working in shifts every few hundred years these people are the most dangerous characters in the series as they remember the world left behind and lack the ignorance of history which the people living in the main silos are able to cling to for support.
The fact that there was a revolution in some of the outer Silos which deactivated their self-destruct buttons and chose to live on their own in their own way was fascinating but never explored because in the third book they're destroyed by a drone strike off screen, the exodus of hundreds of refugees across the ground and out towards the cleaner air which they knew was close should have been a lot more interesting with the characters walking across and in front of the various other Silos cameras and likely setting off revolutions and riots all over the place but instead it isn't even a footnote.
My biggest gripe was something which reminded me of the book Enders Shadow, where a conversation seen in the first book is explored more deeply from a different perspective in the next book and the difficulty in making a character who isn't like they were previously say the same things they said in the last book while trying to hide the fact that what they're saying doesn't fit with the character we know now.
My other problem with the first book was that the main character really didn't do anything of note in the first book(she stepped up a bit in the third book and the second one). It was all the people around her who actually did most of the work of the story on her behalf, fighting her wars for her, attacking her enemies, building her the means to escape etc. If she had died halfway through the book the ending would have not been much different at all, actually she did talk to another character a lot which caused him to have a change of heart about the way things should have been done in the Silo but that still doesn't really change all that much of the story.
Aside from those small grips I really liked this book, the setting, the mystery, the characters and the story all served to create a memorable first novel from a promising first time author. There is a bleak
What makes this book all the more remarkable is the path which the author took in writing it, he started out writing a short story online(the opening chapters) and then when people said they liked it he expanded it outwards and onwards creating new characters and concepts and expanding the story as well as letting fans write stories set in the same universe and getting direct feedback from them about elements of the story and adjusting his work accordingly.
He self published it on Amazon and then when it started selling well and gaining some serious buzz he was approached by a publisher to publish a hard copy of the book and by extension the rest of the series as it came out. He agreed but he kept the rights to the digital version for himself and was paid half a million dollars for the print rights.
This book and 50 Shades of Grey seem to be the first of a wave of digital book success stories with authors creating content online and working to get their stuff out there and finding increasing chances of success as the marketplace changes. Matthew Reilly, author of Ice Station started off by independently publishing his first novel Contest(set in the New York Public Library) and then had it noticed by a publisher who picked him up afterwards, this was before the internet really gave people the option of publishing and distributing online and before Kindles and tables became as popular as they are today.
Wool and books like it represent a slow but eventual shift in the publishing world as online stuff grows. The downside is that terribly written stuff like 50 Shades of Grey will occasionally slip through accidentally like Snakes on a Plane, the upside is that authors are connected to their audience like never before and can get better feedback than they would have at any other time in history. Wool is for me the start of this trend and I'm looking forwards to where it ends up, even though I don't read e-books as a rule.
My Day.
Well I submitted this at 8am on Friday so my day yesterday was not all that interesting. I got up in the morning and looked after my brother before making him some breakfast followed by some dinner for the slow cooker, I then went home to get some shoes and then into the city to get some comic books, after that I went back home for about ten minutes before heading out to Soccer training. Training was pretty good, just six of us there tonight. I think I need to start writing down what I think I need to improve upon in each game once the game is over so I can find stuff to work on in training because we tend to be a little bit aimless most weeks, we usually just have a kick-around and then some drills. It isn't hard but it isn't always essential stuff we need for the games.
Once that was over I came home and was going to start writing this review but I really didn't feel up to it for some reason, I think I'm getting a bit burnt out on writing so much every day. Last year I had a few days where I didn't write very much at all and I'm thinking I might need such a break this weekend. I'll see how I'm feeling later. I ended up re-watching Orange is the New Black until about 4am and then started writing. I'm pretty sure I've ruined whatever chance I had of getting back on a normal sleep pattern now. So yay for me!
YouTube Video of the Day.
The world needs more HR experts.
Click to view