When did the future stop being something to look forward to? It used to be all shiny and quirky, populated by bizarre technology and food in the form of pellets. I remember being particularly taken by the prospect of food pellets. You put your plate under a machine and pressed a button and – kazaam! Your dinner clanked down in three neat, meat-and-two-veg capsules.
Why such a thing would strike me as desirable, or even acceptable, I can’t imagine. Were we just hopelessly naive in those days? Cars which could fly (but didn’t need petrol). Streets where you didn’t have to walk (just stood there and would be carried to your destination).
Glowing chrome-and-steel streetscapes (where nobody needed to work). We were promised it all. And if we didn’t exactly believe it, still it led us to believe that the future would, at the very least, be intriguing and fun.
These days a shiny, colourful future appears to be a thing of the past.
Over the holiday period, in a bid to escape the horrible tsunami of “festive” programming, I recorded three sci-fi films: Blade Runner, Silent Running and Moon. They are all wonderful slices of film-making.
Escapist, however, they are not.
Corporations gone bonkers, random violence and social paranoia, mass extinctions, environmental degradation – I might as well have been watching the news, followed by a wildlife documentary. I returned to my pile of unread books, where my eye snagged on a bundle of five individual volumes tied together by a wide strip of bright yellow paper emblazoned with the phrase “Is seeing always believing?” What caught my eye was that while the first volume was very, very slim – less than 50 pages – the books grew progressively thicker. In a publishing world where book covers have routinely blossomed into thickets of impenetrable subtitles, the simple title was also attractive. Wool, it said. I picked up Part One.
Within a day I was hooked. I even woke up in the wee hours of the morning, at one point, couldn’t get back to sleep, and instead of huffing and puffing and tossing and turning, went cheerfully downstairs in search of another volume. And this although, guess what? Wool is a sci-fi series set in a dystopian future. Earth is a goner, the atmosphere too toxic for carbon-based life-forms to breathe.
The only remaining survivors live in a silo, where the punishment for those who disobey the rules is to be sent out to die in full view of everyone who chooses to watch; and the biggest crime of all is the habit of asking awkward questions.
A major part of the appeal is the way in which Hugh Howey portrays life in this unlikely environment. He doesn’t go in for long descriptive passages – story is everything in Wool – but he creates a world so convincingly claustrophobic that, at times, you find yourself checking around just to make sure you haven’t inadvertently, à la dystopian Star Trek, been beamed up there.
Howey’s Silo-18 may be a spiral staircase to nowhere, but it has a cast of vivid characters, a recognisable society, gossip, politics, and enjoyably coy glances back to our own lamentably careless culture. And then there’s Jules: a female hero who’s every bit as heroic as Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies, this woman can fix pumps and think logically and is compassionate and – of course – gorgeous.
Howey, as he explains in a prologue entitled “My self-publishing success story”, wrote Wool as a stand-alone short story. (It’s interesting that the necessary end to a “self-publishing success story” appears always to involve the writer being picked up by a “real” publisher – but that’s another story). As soon as Wool went up online, people began to write back to Howey. “Tell us more,” they said. So he did. The first five volumes are now being published by Century in one satisfying fistful which is popping up all over the place as one of the most hotly-anticipated books of 2013.
Wool isn’t perfect: in places the writing shows signs of hurry. But as you rattle along, charging up and down that wretched metal staircase, it won’t bother you too much. You’ll be too busy taking deep breaths of fresh air in the blessed, real-world present. Not because it’s particularly fragrant. Just because you can.