Hugh Howey 2014. Wool, Shift, Dust. Cloud Library ebook. 1324 pp.


Epic page turner that reads a bit like a 3 volume train crash. Built on a couple of premises:

  • that a single US Senator could get enough power to build and equip ~50 buried concrete silos each capable of keeping a population of 1,000+ alive in isolation, all the while pretending they are nuclear shelters
  • that warfare culminates in virus-size artifical bots made of carbon that can replicate, disperse globally, can wipe out all humans, and can self-sustain for decades after the last human is gone; and that several nations get to this stage ~simultaneously

Neither premise is close to believable, even in SF-land, but that doesn’t seem to matter that much. Several well-realised characters help.