Dynamics in “Dust” are Downright Delicious

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.

"Shift" in Time and Ideas

A Review of Shift, 2^nd book in the Shift Series by Hugh Howey

If you like a novel that pulls your attention into the drama and the characters, you’ll love Hugh Howey’s Shift Omnibus. I read it in my car during every half-hour lunch break, often still reading it as I walked back into the building. For those of you who haven’t read the first book in the series, Wool, STOP! Read it first, so events are clearer. Plus there are spoilers in this review. For those of you who read have Wool, the second book, Shift is even better.

Shift is aptly named for its contents. It follows one man, Donald, through different work shifts with increasing tension and dangerous outcomes. These outcomes effect the people living securely away in other silos, safe from a toxic environment filled with certain death. It also answers some of the questions which remained after reading Wool. Shift is divided into three novellas which follow Donald through his shifts. “First Shift – Legacy” jumps between 2049, when plans begin that lead to a world which can’t support humanity, and 2110, when Donald is awaken for his shift in Silo 1, the command center of 50 silos. “Second Shift – Order” happens in 2212 and jumps back and forth between Silo 1 and Silo 18 during the year of an uprising. “Third Shift - Pact” takes place in 2345, and involves Silos 1, where Donald is mistakenly identified as the man in charge, and Silo 17 as another rebellion is in progress.

The Prologue to “First Shift – Legacy,” has the same contrasting imagery of life and death as Wool contained. “Troy [a.k.a. Donald] returned to the living and found himself inside of a tomb.” He is, in fact, inside a cryonic chamber and has just been reanimated. Howey fills us with Troy’s sensations of the frosted glass through which he can see dark shapes hovering, the weakness of his muscles surrounded by a paper gown and the horrible taste in his mouth. He is given water and pills that “stung his throat… [and made’] memories fade like dreams upon waking.” He must forget his past life so he can work his shift in the here, beneath the hills of Georgia, and now, 2110. He emerges with “the feeling of deep time and yesterdays mingled.” This is the cycle of Donald’s life: waking, trying to remember what the pills make him forget then being refrozen in a “coffin” to dream of his past life.

In these dreams of his past life, we learn that he was once Congressman Donald Keene, who originally majored in architecture and is recruited by Senator Thurman for a special project. Donald has a keen eye for details, and one that pertains to Senator Thurman is his waiting room, which is “stripped of its obligatory law books until only a handful remained. These tomes sat silently in the dim corners of the glass cabinets.” There are also pictures on the wall of Thurman shaking hands with the last four presidents, in which Thurman hardly seems to change, as if “unfazed by the passing decades.” We have to wonder if this isn’t some hint the Thurman as already been using the cryogenics we read about in the Prologue. Donald also notes, “The two arrangements spoke volumes: the uniform from the past and the coins from those currently deployed, bookends on a pair of wars. One that the Senator had fought in as a youth. The other, a war he had batted to prevent as an older and wiser man.”

It is these minute details that create the Silo world. Details about the people like the Mission Jones in Silo 18, where “Deathdays were birthdays. … An old man dies and a lottery is won. Children weep while hopeful parents cry tears of joy.” As we saw in Wool, population is staunchly controlled in the silos. Of course, it would have to be. Resources and space is limited. Hence the continual paradox of death meaning life. And just as we grow to dislike the cold and memoryless people manning Silo 1, we grow to care about the people in the other silos who live out their daily lives, rather than sleeping through enormous periods of time. The people who work as their daily jobs as porters delivering heavy packages up dozens of flights of stairs, or mechanics in the “down deep” who keep the vital equipment running for producing energy and oxygen. They are real people with families and dreams and hopes. So that when a silo is threatened with a “shut down” during a rebellion, we know it means death to the elderly and children alike. We know it means letting the outside in and an end to lives that never saw the sun.

Shutting down silos is not what Donald wants to do from his secure location in Silo 1. His dream was to save lives, not destroy them. That’s why he worked with Senator Thurman to build the silos, which were supposed to be storage for toxic waste to bring in revenue for Georgia. Even as Donald designed the plans according to Thurman’s specks, he questioned their true purpose. Thurman’s no fool, though. He has Donald working with his daughter, Anna Thurman, with whom Donald had an ex-martial affair. Anna distracts and redirects Donald from the true purpose of the silos.

By Donald’s third shift, we are back at Silo 17 and another paradox: “The Loud came before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.” We meet Jimmy Parker, who is still in school, and Mrs. Peterson, his wizened teacher. We also encounter Solo again, who fell in love with Juliette “Jules” Nichols in Wool: Casting Off. Jules is major of Silo 17 now and making more threats. This time to Silo 1, where she’s going to get them, too.

But telling you more would mean ruining many of the twists and turns that Silo contains. What you really need to know is that the book it spell-binding and the silo worlds are built with incredible detail and depth. So much depth that I also read the third book, Dust. I haven’t read all three volumes of a trilogy since Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. It’s that good!