A Review of Dust, third book in the Shift Series by Hugh Howey
Some trilogies lose
momentum by the second book of the series and become downright boring by the
third. Other trilogies move forward toward the same goal and maintain reader
interest with equal enthusiasm from book to book. When it comes to sagas, it’s
even more challenging to sustain reader attention. Those sagas that manage to
do so deserve respect and notoriety. Hugh Howey’s Shift Saga is one of those deserving respect. Dust, the third book in the saga, keeps the dynamic characters
growing and carries the plot to a desirable ending, thus maintaining the
interest and satisfaction of the reader.
If you’ve read my reviews
of Wool and Shift, you’ll remember I said the Prologues are important. They lay
the foundation for each book. This continues to be true in Dust, where we are reintroduced to Lucas Kyle, the starry-eyed
dreamer of clear skies who fell in love with Sheriff Juliette “Jules” Nichols
in the first book, Wool. Lucas is
still manning the radio of Silo 18 as they recuperate from the uprising
prompted by Jules’ surviving the “cleaning.” If you’ll remember, “cleaning”
means going out into the toxic world to clean the camera lens so those inside
the Silos can view the scary outside world. It a death sentence for one, and a
license to bear a child for some lucky lottery winner. By surviving the
“cleaning,” Jules upsets the proverbial apple cart and starts a chain of events
that effects all the remaining silos. Anyway, Lucas survived the uprising and
is talking on the radio to an unnamed man from Silo 1 who says he’s “trying to
help them.” The man encourages Lucas to continuing studying everything in the
secret treasure trove of books hidden under the server room. Lucas thinks it’s
a waste of time, but the man from Silo 1 says, “Everything’s important.” Lucas reports
he’s reading about a fungus that reprograms brains and the man explains that,
“It means… It means we aren’t free. None of us are.” So at the heart of this man-made
disaster, which has forced generations of survivors to live in the controlled
environment of the Silos, is the need of a handful of people to control human
destiny itself. This strikes at the heart of everyone who loves their freedom
and we want to rebel alongside those up rose up in the Silos. We root for the
men and women trying to regain their physical freedom, and we now know they
also need freedom of thought, which is much more challenging to achieve.
Jules, now mayor of Silo
18, is one of those freedom fighters who has transcended into free thinking.
She rebelled against her punishment of being sent to certain death during the “cleaning”
by surviving it. She rebelled against the narrow environment of Silo 18 by
discovering and returning from Silo 17. And now Jules intends to rescue the
handful of people who survived Silo 17’s uprising by retrieving them from that
silo. In order to do this, she has a team from Mechanical tunneling through the
walls in order to reach Silo 17. This goes against all their programmed fears
of breaking the walls and letting the toxic outside into their secure world. It
pushes the people of Silo 18 against their pre-programmed superstitions about
maintaining the seals and pushes them to the brink of an uprising against
Jules. Freedom has a cost. This cost is a paradigm shift that not everyone is
ready to accept. Jules certainly has her hands full as she tries to free all
her people from dungeons both physical and mental. That’s part of what keeps
this series alive. We grow to love Jules, despite her tempter, despite her
hard-headedness…she is the one we follow because she cares about the people who
died in the uprisings. She feels guilty for her part in prompting the
rebellion. She wants to save her people. In short, we like her character. In
fact, we tend to like most of the working class characters in this book because
we, who are also working class, want to break out of our Silos, too. And maybe
that, more than any other reason, is at the heart of what drives us to the Shift Saga.
Another thing that
accounts for the success of the Shift Saga,
is Hugh Howey’s ability to build a world that we can feel, taste, smell and
hear. The details of a society living in a 121-story silo underground are
marvelous. We feel like we are right there with the characters, yet the amount
of description does not interfere with story…they enhance it and shape it into
a place we understand.
I recommended the Silo Saga to my sister, but she said
it’s difficult to read because of its dark tone. The juxtaposition of life and
death seems morbid, but it embraces the danger of nanotechnology released in an
uncontrolled environment. The consequences in this case being a dull controlled
life for generations of survivors. But if you continue reading the books, you
see that, just as life exists beside death, hope exists beside despair and you
grow to admire the malleability of the human race to find joy through all
trials and purpose during all hardships. My only contention with the book is
its ending chapters, which I won’t spoil for you at this time. Let me just say
that there were some issue that should have been addressed
about the final transition which weren’t. All in all, the Shift Saga is well worth reading and I recommend it to all those
who love science fiction and dystopian in particular.