Wool (Silo #1)

by Hugh Howey

For those who dare to hope.

This was the laughter of youth, of souls who had not yet come to grips with where they lived, who did not yet feel the press of the earth on all sides, who in their minds were not buried at all, but alive.

“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good.

Holston thought that maybe people went along with it because they couldn’t believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.

“There is no uprising, not really, there’s just a gradual leak. Just the people who know, who want out.”

At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he’d been condemned for his simple sin of hope.

Could someone have decided that the truth was worse than a loss of power, of control? Or was it something deeper and more sinister?

She had dreamed of a return to her youth and had instead found herself haunted by old ghosts.

What she had always seen as her calling—this living apart and serving the greater good—now felt more like a curse. Her life had been taken from her. Squeezed into pulp.

Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

To impatient youth, all things took forever and any kind of waiting was torture.

It was an evil concoction, inviting but false.

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far below, but unable to make it out before his senses returned and reality snatched him back from the edge.

“What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.”

Her curiosity was much stronger than her fear.

They put us in this game, a game where breaking the rules means we all die, every single one of us. But living by those rules, obeying them, means we all suffer.”

The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.

He was the virus. If he sneezed the wrong words, it would kill everyone he knew.

Juliette had promised herself never to love in secret again, never to love at all. And somehow this time was worse: she had kept it a secret even from him. Even from herself.

Those in power fear our ability to come together and share ideas, thoughts, and dreams.

The modern challenge has been to overcome our base instincts and look at the world with rational eyes. Or, even more challenging, dare to look with hope.

The heroes are Allison, who will not trust a single screen to tell her what’s out there. And Juliette, who believes that anything broken can be repaired.

I’ve learned over the years to reject any question that gives preeminence to a particular place or time. This bias of our centrality almost always leads us astray.

we know far more about present events than we do a past that we barely study. The pace of innovation, for instance, feels like it’s moving at its swiftest pace ever, but there is a good argument to be made that the world was changing more rapidly a century ago than it is today. Cries of record partisanship and nastiness in politics ignore the fact that politicians once shot each other in the streets and had fist fights in congress.

Every generation thinks it lives in unique times. This bias is almost always wrong.

From 1930 to 1954, nearly three thousand western films were made!

Westerns are also stories about survival along the edges of civilization. They are stories about barely getting by in new lands where laws are tenuous, strangers are dangerous, and harsh conditions bring out the best in our heroes and the worst in everyone else.

Throughout human history, we have told stories as much for warning as for entertainment.

An expression of our internal fears and external exhortations, the disaster story became a fixture.

These days, when we want to tell a wilderness story, we have to look beyond horizons of distance and think about horizons of time. We need to imagine a future where we might be exploring other worlds, or a future where our world returns to the wilderness that we fear.

no era and no people are all that unique. Which is a marvelous thing.

I met people on hundreds of islands, and I found far more in common than unique among us. We are not special . . . which is special. We have the same fears, the same hopes, the same love of overcoming odds, the same addiction to our fellow man and our tools, such that the loss of them fills us with the greatest of dreads. That’s what makes us human. That’s our story. And it’s a story as old as time.

The truth is that storytelling has almost always been an oral tradition. There is supposed to be a live audience, and the energy of that audience influences the storytelling and even the story itself.

We crave human connection. We long for stories that drag us through agony but give us a glimmer of hope. We want to read disaster stories that teach us how to survive. Above all, we are hooked on the relationships we form with our favorite fictional characters, and the relationships we form with the authors who create them and our fellow readers who adore them as much as we do.