Shift (2013)
Hugh Howey (1975)
603 pages[Note: although I make it a point to not include spoilers in my reviews, this is the second book in a trilogy, and it's not possible to write about it without including some context from the first book, Wool. So, if you haven't read that first book yet, I suggest you jump back to my review here.]
In Wool (reviewed here), Hugh Howey introduced us to a world of silos, deep underground structures home to thousands of people living beneath a poisonous surface. The story in Wool takes place during a critical couple of weeks in the life of a silo, as the elite of the existing order struggle against a revolution from below. The novel provides some hints at how this strange, future world came about, but we readers only come to know what the characters themselves can ferret out from the well-hidden information they discover, and we are constrained too in our understanding by the characters own biases based on their limited view of the world they grew up in. Shift, the second novel in the series, serves as a prequel to Wool, describing the origin history of this future world.(If you have not yet read Wool, then you may want to skip the rest of this review until you have; I try to keep any of my reviews from containing significant spoilers, but it is not possible to review Shift without giving away some information that is only revealed well into the telling of Wool. Even my opening paragraph above reveals a subtle piece of information that many of the characters in the story only discover well into the action.)
Shift tells the founding story of the world of silos. Spanning several centuries, the action begins just thirty-five years or so in our future, concluding at roughly the same point as Wool, though from a new point of view. In Shift, Howey describes all too plausible global dangers and political machinations during the middle of our current century that lead to the construction and operation of the silos. By transforming relatively minor extrapolations of current technology into deadly weapons, evil forces in the world threaten to destroy humanity even as powerful leaders aware of the danger struggle to put in place their solution to it. Once the silos have been built and populated, the remainder of the story takes place over the succeeding centuries, as the law of unintended consequences frustrates the careful planning, and many checks and balances, that the “founders” built into their system.
Whereas Wool reads as an adventure story of revolution and discovery set in a far, if dystopian, future, Shift adds to the mix a nightmarish reality of how the silos come about that feels too probable not to leave a reader scared for the future of our real world.
Like Wool, Shift was originally written as a set of e-books which have been combined here into a single print edition titled The Shift Omnibus. The approach Howey uses is similar in both novels: in each of three sections (originally released as separate e-books), the action is divided into very short chapters which alternate between two frames of reference, the two paths eventually coming together as the action in the section plays out. And, as in the earlier novel, this technique and Howey’s writing style in general give the story an urgency and ‘cliff-hanger’ feeling that make it hard to set the book down.
A quote from my review of Wool applies equally to this prequel: “Whatever you do, don’t read Hugh Howey’s novel Wool --- unless you are prepared to drop everything else you are doing and stiff-arm any interruptions. Once you have entered into his dystopian view of earth’s future, you won’t want to set the book down until you finish.”
Other reviews / information:
A third novel, Dust, will apparently be appearing soon.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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