Escaping From The Echo Chamber

 

Silo

Hugh Howey

(Penguin)

The silo is the whole world and the only things outside it are desolation, chaos, and death. At least that’s what the people who have grown up within its curved walls have been led to believe, most of them anyway. A few brave souls have dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy and usually paid a heavy price for doing so. Raised as an engineer in the ‘Down Deep’, the mechanical heart of the silo, Jules is the latest and maybe the most resourceful iconoclast willing to risk it all to uncover the truth.

Silo, and I say this from the perspective of someone who isn’t by nature a fan, is the sort of novel that gives fantasy a good name. One that reminds its readers that the best books in the genre are always about the here and now as much as somewhere on the far edge of Never-Neverland.

Hugh Howey draws on an impressive range of influences to create a world that is entirely believable in its physical and intellectual claustrophobia. These include Plato’s cave and E.M Forster’s seminal novella The Machine Stops, both of which suggest a world in which the inhabitants are starved of accurate information about what exists outside their confined surroundings, and so have filled the resulting vacuum with distorted imaginings.

The silo itself could be seen as a metaphor for our highly stratified society, with the blue-collar mechanicals of the Down Deep separated physically and culturally from the more white-collar upper levels. Authority, such as it is, is compromised by a technocratic elite operating by their own rules to achieve their own ends. It would be hard to read this without thinking of America in the age of culture wars, rampant inequality and a dream turned sour.

The above could make Silo sound like a dry and didactic read, it is anything but that. Hugh Howey is a practiced hand at delivering fantasy novels that excite, engage, and have the capacity to make his readers think. In Jules he has created a central character who appealingly combines courage, resourcefulness, and a fierce determination to live by her own high moral standards in an often painfully compromised world.

Silo is the first in a trilogy of novels and develops its ideas and storyline in a way that makes the other two installments worth looking out for.