An e-book sensation that is finally available in print, Hugh Howey’s epic dystopian page turner, a unique vision of the apocalypse: Wool.
In a ruined and toxic landscape, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo's rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside.
His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in law, whose special knack is fixing machines. Now Juliette is about to be entrusted with fixing her silo, and she will soon learn just how badly her world is broken. The silo is about to confront what its history has only hinted about and its inhabitants have never dared to whisper: Uprising.
We’re pleased to share this blog from the author – perhaps more pleased than we usually are, to be honest, as Hugh Howey is a bookseller turned author.
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Optimism, Pessimism, and Wool
I was working on a roof when I thought of the idea for a story. I had spent the previous decade working as a yacht captain, which had allowed me to see places as disparate as Cuba, Barbados, and Canada’s Thousand Islands. Now, living inland and working as a roofer, my view of the world was limited to a TV screen, a newspaper, a computer monitor. I was no longer seeing the world; I was seeing shadows on a cave wall, much as Plato once lamented.
And so I imagined a world where people live underground; they can see the landscape around them only through a single screen, and they have to trust that the world is as bad as it’s presented. Life in this underground silo is tenuous, with every birth requiring a death, and nobody is allowed to dream that the world beyond their walls might be a place worth exploring, worth venturing out into. That’s how I came up with the world of Wool.
When all we’re given is bad news, who wants to leave their house? This was the jarring discovery I made as I left a career of travel and embraced a sedentary life. Suddenly, the world I had seen was presented as something black and sinister. Car wrecks and robberies carried the day. It stood out to me because I’ve always been an optimist. Well, in all ways except a few. I can be a pessimist in some ways, which explains Wool’s journey to publication.
I’ve never been upbeat about my talents as a writer. Like many of those who submit their creative work to the public, I suffered a crippling anxiety of revealing myself and being rejected. For four years, I self-published novels without sending them to agents or publishers. As a bookseller, I was all too aware of the slight chances of making it as a writer, so I didn’t try. I wrote for myself. When the story found readers online, I never thought the readership would grow beyond a small following. The optimist in me came up with the idea for Wool. The pessimist told me to toss it online, charge a buck (the smallest amount possible) and not to bother promoting it or even put a link to the story on my website.
The pessimist in me was wrong.
Just a year and a half later, that short story has turned my life upside down. Readers demanded that I continue the story, and so I did. The resulting novel was optioned by Ridley Scott for a film adaptation, has been picked up in 24 countries for translation, spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, became a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, and has in every way possible exceeded my wildest dreams.
And now, the impossible. A bookseller who spent his time writing before work and during lunch breaks, is about to go on a book tour to launch his novel in American bookstores. Simon & Schuster has acquired the rights to bring a print edition of Wool to an audience that has not experienced the silo, the adventures of Juliette, and this world of mystery and intrigue that has reached half a million people in digital form.
This is a story I created from my perspective of the world as a decent place. It is a story published quietly because I couldn’t see my writing in the same positive light. Somewhere along the way my story found online readers who saw what I didn’t, who made this happen, who had a glimpse of something in a screen and wondered what it would be like to go and explore. Now, that adventure is moving from the screen to paper, and I hope a new audience likes what it discovers.
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Copyright © 2013 by Hugh Howey.
Thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada for sharing this blog.