Wool by Hugh Howey

Posted on: June 29, 2013

Wool by Hugh Howey

Previously published in Dawn’s Books & Authors. 

Hugh Howey is a man who once worked for $10/hour selling books. He must have been very good at sales, because a just few years ago he wrote a 60-odd page post-apocalyptic story about people surviving a dead, irradiated earth in a giant underground bunker. Wool was priced at just under a dollar and has since then sold nearly half a million times over via the Amazon self-publishing platform. Fans begged for more and more; Howey gave them more and more until traditional publishers stepped in to the scene too. After many negotiations, Howey struck gold with publishing giants, garnering a ‘sweetheart deal’ for a print version of Wool, while he kept the rights to his e-books. Hollywood came calling, and the film rights have been optioned by Ridley Scott, the legend behind films like Alien, Bladerunner & Gladiator. Follow up books are being waited for by thousands of fans with bated breath, books that will be released both traditionally and digitally. Hugh Howey is no longer a bookseller. He is now a self-publishing legend. 

That Howey has clearly been very savvy about marketing and selling Wool can not be denied in any way - he is an immensely relevant success story of the possibilities of digital self-publishing. The question then remains whether Wool is any good or not, regardless of its almost unbelievable viral-wildfire spread. It is impossible to judge Wool as a novel free of any baggage, or to wipe away any information gathered about its prior success online. It is also impossible to remove Wool from the genre it belongs too, or to judge it lightly because it was not necessarily written as a novel. Is Wool truly good, or is it one of those Gangam Style viral hits that experience a level of completely inexplicable success?

The answer is not as simple - Wool is neither. For the purposes of this review, I refer solely to the Omnibus edition, published in mass paperback by Century earlier this year. This contains a number of the original e-books, and is followed up later this year by Shift. 

Wool is about a woman called Jules who dares to go against the grain of the society she is a part of, a society made up of people who live in a 150-floor massive underground bunker they called a silo. Everything is controlled by strict rules - marriages, births, employment, even agriculture. Most people live within the system as they’ve been designated to do, believing in the dictum that the silo has always existed to protect the people from the irradiated toxic earth outside. There is a mayor and a sheriff, who mostly deal with petty crimes. It is forbidden to question the life that is being lead, forbidden to mention the outside world or a desire to leave the silo. If someone expresses a desire to leave, they are sent outside to clean the windows that look out into the barren world - ‘two squirts from the cleaning bottle before you scrub with wool’, they’re told (hence the title of the book). No one returns from this trip to the outside - they clean, they see ‘brown grass and grey skies. No green. No blue. No life.’ and they die, just as expected. Until of course, one person does none of the above. 

Wool is not a very complex read. This will suit readers unfamiliar with the genre, but may well disappoint more sophisticated fans of speculative fiction. The premise itself is not original - many fans of the genre will recognise (and have pointed out many times online), that Wool is deeply derivative of multiple classics - it echoes heavily of Philip K. Dick’s short story The Defenders (itself the basis for his novel The Penultimate Truth), of Logan’s Run and even of the video game Fallout. Howey has been fairly open about his ‘influences’ but that isn’t enough to save Wool from often reeking heavily of fan fiction - which it is not. Portions of Wool work well but as a whole, the narrative is jerky with stilted pacing and uneven prose. The plot itself works, but once again, does not offer anything new to the genre. The characters are all one-dimensional, with their motives so clearly delineated that they are bland, predictable What must be said is that Jules herself is a refreshing protagonist - an adult woman who is not perfect, not beautiful but strong, smart and  determined. Practical, not glamorous, Jules had learnt to fix problems with her hands, ‘had learned to attack them with grease and with fire, with penetrating oil and with brute strength’, and that is the way she handles everything she is faced with - whether it’s a sudden rise in the silo to the post of sheriff, or the need for survival in a toxic environment. 

Howey’s rise to fame seemed to be a fairy tale until he very recently fell from grace in the eyes of a great many writers and fans alike. In a lengthy, misogynistic blog post published on his site in April, Howey described his great ire at a stranger he encountered at a convention - a woman who did not know he had signed a major publishing contract or that he was a self-publishing success and so went on to be disparaging about self-publishing. Instead of simply sharing his personal experience or opinion, Howey resorted to publishing a highly condescending rant titled ‘The Bitch from WorldCon’, calling the stranger a ‘crazy bitch who needs to be slapped’. Many writers took offense at this post and hundreds of Howey’s fans expressed their disappointment in his attitude. A week later Howey removed the post but whether that was enough to bring back those of his readers who were disgusted remains to be seen. It is hard to remove the writer from his work entire, and had Wool been brilliant, perhaps this would not matter as much but as it happens, a large part of Wool’s appeal was Howey’s Cinderella story - and no one would generously wish a mean, obnoxious Cinders a happy ever after.