It’s been a long time since I was so thoroughly sucked into a fictional universe as I was with Wool. Honestly, that’s what I miss about fantasy, historical fiction and sci-fi books — while the writing may be good, it is rare that I would feel totally enfolded into the history, the context and the world that an author creates. I think the last time that happened was with the first book of the Chaos Trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go. Hugh Howey does this for […]
The End of a Dystopian Trilogy
I’ve noticed reviews for Wool and Silo on here over the past few weeks from different reviewers, so I’m sure there are going to be a few more Dust soon. Here’s my take.
I bet Silo workers keep their hats in the Caps Lock
[Second Novel In A Series Alert! Review of the first book is here] Sequels are exceptionally tricky affairs to balance. If you stray too far afield from what came before, then you risk alienating the audience you built with the original. If you hew too closely, then you’re bringing nothing new to the table. But as difficult as following up a story can be, fleshing out what came before is an even more difficult tightrope to walk. In order to write a proper prequel, you […]
A Well Spun Yarn
Wool is one of those futuristic, dystopian, post-apocolytpic, insert your own buzzword here, type books that I’m sure is packaged as a three-book series…(checking internets)…yep, it’s called the Silo Series and also includes the novels Shift and Dust. Despite my sarcasm, this was a book I couldn’t set down many times. The novel started as a short story that was released by Amazon for the Kindle in 2011. Due to its popularity, Howey continued writing and amassed a three book collection in two years. Basically […]
Dystopian fiction rarely goes this deep
There has been enough digital ink spilled over the past couple of years about our culture’s current fascination with the apocalypse and dystopian visions of the future that it sometimes seems that the apocalypse is going to come not when our ice cream machines can take no more of people insisting that “birthday cake” should be a flavor for anything, but from the keyboards that are so tired of conveying the idea of the end of the world that they decide to just get on […]