Amazon self-publishing icon Hugh Howey has signed a deal with AMC and Apple to adapt his unconventional post-apocalyptic sci-fi omnibus into a TV show – it’s big news for fans, and even bigger news for Howey. “I’ve been telling myself and others for a decade that this show will never get made, so please stop asking me about it or getting your hopes up,” he says. “I guess I was wrong.”
Debuted on Kindle in 2011, Wool introduces readers to the “Silo”, a 144-level subterranean city-state for the survivors of… what exactly? Citizens of the Silo don’t ask questions like that. Besides, Juliette Nichols doesn’t have time for tedious, existential problems just now. She’s been unexpectedly (and with some reluctance) promoted out of the Silo’s “down deep” machinery and maintenance shop to a new job on one of the top levels – but things are about to get complicated.
The TV show stars Rebecca Ferguson (Dune, Mission: Impossible) as Juliette, and she’s also executive producer on the project with writer Graham Yost (Band of Brothers, Justified) and director Morten Tyldum (Defending Jacob, The Imitation Game).
I slid into Hugh Howey’s DMs on Twitter for more info.
You’re writing a synopsis of Wool for your grade ten book report. Go!
HH: Wool has fewer sheep than one might imagine. The title instead seems to reference the old saying to have wool pulled over one’s eyes, as the occupants of an underground Silo are led to believe that their only view to the outside world is to be believed. After the sheriff breaks their most important law, things go from bad to worse to possibly disastrous when a female mechanic from the depths of the Silo is promoted to take his place.
The show has been bouncing between production departments since about 2012. How does it feel that this dream project is now a reality?
HH: It feels surreal. I’ve been telling myself and others for a decade that this show will never get made, so please stop asking me about it or getting your hopes up. I guess I was wrong. I just heard from the showrunner today, and there are 200 folks building sets outside of London right now. The Silo is being built. That’s insane.
Have you been involved in writing the script? Consulting on set design? Choosing the cast?
HH: I was in the writing room as we broke down the seasons, the first ten episodes, and the pilot. So I’ve had a lot of input, but I didn’t write any of the scripts from scratch. Instead, I’ve been reading them and giving notes and doing meetings to hammer out how we make all the plot beats work together. It’s been a blast. As for casting, I’ve let the experts handle this. Availability is a huge obstacle, as so many things are going into production all at once right now. So if I were in charge of casting, it would be weeks of trying to figure out whose calendar lined up with our shooting schedule. Thankfully, much smarter people are heading that up, and they’ve been absolutely killing it.
Wool spans three books, but the Silo series includes nine books in total. How much of this is making it into the show?
HH: All of it, eventually. The first season won’t even get through the five books that make up Wool. There’s a very natural cliffhanger in the novel that makes a perfect break for the end of season one. We think we can tell the full trilogy in four seasons of TV. But first we’ve gotta do a good enough job on this season that Apple and AMC will want to make more.
“If the lies don’t kill you, the truth will.” Wool is totally metaphorical, isn’t it?
HH: Every single word of it. I used to balk at my English professors who would read between the lines and tell us all the hidden messages in stories, but they were spot-on. When I write a book, I end up doing a dozen passes through it, which gives me the chance to layer in meaning on top of meaning sandwiched between metaphor.
Bernard, the head of IT, is one of Wool’s bad guys. This is a safe space, Hugh. Tell us about the time you were victimised by a computer.
HH: It was September of 1993. I was trying to boot up a copy of Privateer on my homebuilt IBM PC clone (a 486DX, so it had the whiz-bang math co-processor built in). Even with custom config.sys and autoexec.bat files written just to cut down on what was loaded into the 640K of conventional memory, I couldn’t get the damn thing to load with sound (I had a brand new SoundBlaster card installed). Part of the problem was the Thrustmaster HOTAS system I was trying to load in, which had a user-writable EPROM chip customized for Privateer. It was a nightmare.
I know you play video games. Was Fallout an inspiration for Wool? I mean, the Silo is kind of like one of the Vaults…
HH: Not consciously, but perhaps on a deep level. I was a huge fan of the original Fallout games, the isometric turn-based ones. I played through each of those a dozen times, beginning to end (they had all kinds of different endings based on the decisions you made). I think it’s more likely that Fallout and Wool are similar because all of us involved in both grew up in the same era of Cold War paranoia, bomb drills at school, fallout shelters in major cities, backyard bunkers, etc. I mean, it was just a fact of life back then that we’d have to move underground at some point because hell was going to rain down from the heavens.
What’s the one question about Wool that you desperately want to answer, but nobody ever asks?
HH: No one ever asks why there’s no elevator. I would love to explain why someday.
Okay. Why is there no elevator?
HH: It’s the same reason messages cost money. Because allowing people to intermingle and share ideas is how revolutions get started. When I wrote Wool, we’d just seen all these uprisings in the Middle East that they were calling the Twitter Uprisings. Because folks were coordinating their movements on social media.
Totalitarian governments don’t want us moving around or sharing thoughts.