Wool’s publishing story is nearly as interesting as the book itself. Published for the Kindle in 2011 as a five-part serial, the demand for subsequent episodes after the first was such that the entire publication schedule was accelerated so they could be collected in the omnibus edition (which is how I read them). Wool went on to be named Amazon’s indie book of the year and has been the best-selling book on the entire site at times.
Wool is science fiction that harkens back to the post-apocalyptic stories of Bradbury and Dick from the golden age of science fiction writing. We start in The Silo, a gigantic subterranean complex where humanity lives under the ravaged surface of the earth. The story is a pinhole camera, offering the reader the very limited comprehension of reality that the survivors themselves retain. To offer any more than that would be to ruin author Hugh Howey’s gripping expansion of that reality until by the end of the book you are left with a tenuous grasp on the world as it exists here and how it became to be this way, but with just as many questions.
Fortunately for us, Wool is just the first third of what Howley is calling “The Silo Series”. The second omnibus (of three parts) called Shift is already available and the story will come to a finish in Dust (to be published sometime in 2013). If I had any criticism of the first omnibus it would be that the pacing is a bit off and some of the description gets heavy-handed at times, but knowing how it was published, I wonder if some of the pacing issues were a product of its accelerated release.
If you own a Kindle, you can try the first part of Wool for free and I expect if you do, you’ll soon be buying the rest. Outstanding book.
9.0/10
Part one is available free for Kindle users at:
http://www.amazon.com/Wool-Part-One-ebook/dp/B005FC52L0/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1364310438&sr=8-6&keywords=wool+omnibus
Killing Time 