"You don't get the fire back in the box once you've unleashed it," he writes, and while the mixed metaphor might make some break out in hives, it's a sentiment that's hard to deny. Whether or not Howey believes in the details of his story, the anxiety, claustrophobia and lethargy he conjures are heartfelt and convincing. In Shift there are characters who outrun their deaths by being cryogenically frozen, thawing out every 50 years to pop pills, watch videos, do some mind-numbing work and go back to sleep. The pixelated screen that dominates Wool was inspired by Howey's own experience of watching TV news. What succeeds is the dread-inspiring imagery at the trilogy's core (part three, Dust, is out in October). The plot itself offers some genuine surprises, but it's overcomplicated. Settings and characters are bland, particularly the women: we get a standard-issue femme fatale (with an "alluring and elfin quality") and two supportive and long-suffering wife figures. Sci-fi often gets a bad rep for privileging plot above all else, but here the charge sticks. We meet a 23rd-century courier whose graffiti-spattered "silo" is simmering with civil war a Georgia congressman in the near future an abandoned schoolboy whose story ends where Juliette's begins and Troy, who wakes up in 2110 without remembering who he is. Wool's hero was Juliette, a freedom-fighting mechanic born a hundred storeys underground, and the strands of Shift's split narrative take place earlier, explaining how her world came to be.
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May 2023
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