I finished both of these ebooks over the course of the last couple weeks, since my last entry. Two very good books. The characterizations in WOOL were better than those in SHIFT, but I think that was due to the settings for the story. WOOL is told completely in the same location, and there are five or maybe six characters that NEED to be focused upon. Whereas, SHIFT is told in a number of time periods and locations, and has maybe 10-12 characters that require focus.

If you don't know, WOOL is set in a "Silo", where people live underground, in a sort of underground skyscraper, descending 144 levels. There are no elevators in the silo, so communications between the lower levels and the upper levels are handled by some sort of radio (for emergencies) and otherwise by porters who climb the stairs, up and down, delivering messages and packages.

People from the silo can look onto the outside world from a viewscreen, which shows a desolate world devoid of life of any kind. It is a big taboo and actually against the law to talk about leaving the silo. If you do so, the punishment is that you are banished to the very outside you've talked about - in a biohazard suit of some kind - and charges with "cleaning" the sensors, scrubbing them with a wool-like cleaning pad, so that they continue to function well. Everyone cleans the sensors, even those who say they won't do it. Why is that?

SHIFT fills in the backstory. How did people come to live in a silo? What happened? The story was plausible, but sort of disturbing because it seems so plausible to me.

I liked WOOL a bit more than SHIFT, but I really did enjoy both of them and found myself thinking about them when I wasn't reading them.

I read both of them on the Kindle.

Hugh Howey published these because he couldn't interest a major publisher in them, and now that they have become huge hits, he signed a print-only deal to get his books into bookstores and onto shelves at the many places that apparently you just don't get to as an indie writer. It speaks volumes to me about the world of publishing when something like this doesn't get picked up.

Well worth the reads.

*****