Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing
Genre: Science fiction, dystopia
Pages: 89
See the book on: Amazon
My rating: 2/5
Summary from Goodreads:
A cleaning has been performed, and now the silo is without a sheriff. With only one good candidate available, Mayor Jahns and Deputy Mames set off for the Down Deep to recruit her in person. Along the way, they discover much about each other, troubling news about this candidate, and stumble upon fractured alliances that could spell the doom of a silo they’ve worked long years to protect.
Wool 2 wasn’t nearly as compelling or as interesting as Wool 1. My first issue stems from a lack of proper imagery. The two characters are walking downstairs for basically the entire novelization – I believe it is 144 floors or so that they walk down. And this takes them two days. Two days?! If I’m picturing this wrong I would love to know, but 144 flights of stairs simply do not take that long to walk down, even if you are past your prime like both of the main characters here are. The climb back up takes another three or four days. So that’s a week to go up and down 144 flights…I was baffled and it colored my enjoyment of the whole story as it just doesn’t make sense.
Besides that, the story is just pretty boring. It’s more about going up and down stairs than it is about anything interesting. I am still intrigued as to where the omnibus is going to go and obviously you can’t skip this story, but this was not a good addition, especially after how amazing Wool 1 was.
Addendum – April 16, 2012
I discovered that each floor is 33 feet high, after a correspondence with Mr. Howey and some mentions in a later book, First Shift – Legacy. I also discovered I was picturing it wrong, because I couldn’t get the office building stairway out of my head. So when he mentioned a “landing” I was picturing it like this:
Pretty creepy actually
While it should have been more like this:
I just couldn’t wrap my head around the stairs being a spiral, I really wanted them to be flights for some reason. Although I still think two days to go down is ridiculous!
Related posts:
Pingback: Half Way Home, by Hugh Howey | Stumptown Books
I just wanted to say thanks for the pictures. I too was having trouble picturing it. I am on the last section now (reading all 5 at once) and am so happy to find a good post-apocolyptic story. There seem to be many out there these days but few of quality.
(Found you from Goodreads!)
Awesome! I really REALLY enjoyed the Wool series, and the author is an awesome guy who will respond to emails or tweets or whatever you decide to throw at him. Post-apocalyptic stuff is just hard to get right for me, but when it IS right…man! I love it.
this issue was bothering me so i googled the question just now and found this page after having read the omnibus and loving it a few weeks ago. agree that two days to go 144 levels still doesn’t make sense unless for some reason the levels were spaced very far apart (or had incredibly high ceilings). perhaps one day the author can draw a diagram for us.
Updated info posted on hughhowey.com
So its 4:30 am so sorry if this has been talked about before I’m sorry~
I just found some comments on another page and thought I would share my own figures here.
As to why it takes more than a day to travel the depth of the silos?
Silo: 144 levels with a ceiling height of 33′ each is 4752′ PLUS 50′ thick concrete between each level (7150′) for a total of 11,902′ deep, or 142,824 inches = 20,403 steps ( at 7 inches per riser)
This is going off someone else mentioning the ceiling height so please correct me if I’m wrong on that part.
To put this into perspective:
Empire State Building:
1224 feet from ground to 102 floor
There are 1,860 steps from street level to 102nd floor
The record holder for a race up the stairs holds that at 10 minutes 16 seconds, and this guy is a full time stair marathon champ with no backpack or gear to haul.
To put the new data into perspective…
http://www.treppenlauf.de/biddin.htm
This is the Mount Everest Stair Marathon- 39,700 stairs from sea level to top…2012 winning time if I’m reading this right is 13:47:32 for the pros sooo basically you are climbing half the height of Mt.Everest in stairs to reach the top of the Silo. While neat this becomes much harder for me to imagine a hole this size, 2.25 miles deep dug for EACH silo, you would have built an earth mound bigger than Everest creating them blah I know just a book Ill shut up now lol!
So to think of your average person doing this trip not only would the physical toll be extremely high you would also have to add in all of the basic business and casual traffic these stairs will have adding even more time.
So two days for a few people of age and average physical condition? plausible!
Just my thoughts!
A 59 year-old female was among the slower ones to get to the top of the Empire State Building, with a time of 26 minutes (overall average was 17 minutes, fastest time 10 minutes), the climb being 1224 ft, her pace was 0,785 ft/s. With the same pace it would take 4.2 hours to get to the top of the silo, for someone in good form, this shouldn’t be a problem. For someone in no-form, I can easily imagine they’d have to take rests, and two or even three days UP is still plausible, but… not down.