Yonadav Kenyon answers “Why don't the Silos have elevators? It...”

A Goodreads user asked this question about Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1):

Why don't the Silos have elevators? It seems rather inconvenient navigating a 100+ floor city without elevators. I did a search on the Kindle edition of this book, and the word "elevator" doesn't appear. Is there something I missed?

Yonadav Kenyon The silos are huge buildings but very small worlds. If I were designing a multi-generation survival space, I might be tempted to leave out elevators a…moreThe silos are huge buildings but very small worlds. If I were designing a multi-generation survival space, I might be tempted to leave out elevators and force people to use stairs. It makes the silos psychologically much larger than they are. People can take what feels like very long journeys between Down Deep and Up Top. It encourages a probably necessary social stratification with a deep down blue collar culture, elites Up Top, and the people of the mids engaging in that oh so necessary delusion of being upwardly mobile. The stairs make necessary interaction between the levels possible while promoting a 'stay in your lane' culture. Also, the stairs gave people something to do. Almost no one in the silos does any work that actually needs to be done. People are drilling for oil to power a generator that needs to be maintained just to create the illusion that they are doing something that is necessary for the silo's power and their survival. No one knows that IT gets its power from Silo 1 and that the silos could just as easily get all of their power from Silo 1's reactor. Once you've filled all of the seemingly necessary employment opportunities in mechanical and the farms, you still have people who need something to do. The stairs employ a massive number of porters. The porters are incredibly useful to the designers of Silo society because they are the 'common folk' who give cultural cohesion to all levels of the silo. They don't just deliver packages and mail. They spread news and gossip. They control the narrative, or rather the narrative can be controlled through them to a large but not perfect extent.(less)

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