A lot of people
will say that Wool is the greatest
science fiction novel in decades. And then you’ll have the occasional straggler
who says Wool is utterly overrated.
The thing is, if you’ve discovered Wool
prior to its Simon & Schuster-published release on March 12th,
2013, then you very likely specifically searched for dystopian or
post-apocalyptic books—more likely than not, you found Wool on countless Goodreads lists or maybe a blog or two (plus, at
the time, Wool’s Omnibus edition was quite cheap)—and with that being said, Wool delivers on its promise (and
premise): it is an original science fiction book with dystopian and
post-apocalyptic undertones.
What makes Wool so dang good is that I can actually
see the world and people he describes;
and I—despite the avid reader that I am—have trouble with some science fiction
works within the last decade (Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age comes to mind: the concept is good, but its
discombobulated with so many scientific terms and ideas that the characters and
details are lost in the background; Wool’s
characters and locations, on the other hand, are crystal clear). And Hugh Howey
never lets the science outweigh the characters. We accept that the characters
know what they’re doing; that’s good enough for the reader. Many science
fiction writers tend to go overboard on the “science” part of science fiction, rather
than the fiction.
The premise is
simple. It’s not overly perplexed. People live in underground silos; to control
their population, one person is sent out to die in a toxic world (which brings
us to the plot of the novel, and the reason for the title—the people are given
wool suits to wear; they are given the task to go out into the wastelands,
clean the sensors—which are essentially cameras, so everyone else can see the
landscape—and then . . . die), and then, after the cleaning, one married couple
are given permission to have a child. This processed has gone on for hundreds
of years.
Wool
begins with a LOST-esque mystery which unravels over
the course of a few chapters until we meet the main protagonist, Juliette. That’s
as much of the plot that I’ll get into. Just consider Wool as Game of Thrones-esque
drama in the confines of an underground silo.
Expect great
things from Hugh Howey in the future because the future of science fiction (and
self-publishing) is in his hands.
