To say I’ve enjoyed the Wool1 saga by Hugh Howey is an understatement. It’s probably the best long-arc dystopian fiction I’ve ever read. For a kid coming of age in Reagan’s America, I had nightmares of how living in fallout shelters might work. The numbers of generations needed to outlive the half life of nuclear fallout was incomprehensible. At some point the math just doesn’t hold and everything has to collapse.
In the Wool saga, Howey puts a story and framework around these childhood fears and lets his characters play out in this world. It is gripping stuff and I devoured everything published. I came to the party relatively late so having most of the series already available was great. Waiting for these last few books to drop have been interminable.
Dust2 is the very last book in the series and it was made available this last weekend. If you’re short of reading material, like dystopian fiction, and have a little coin to throw around, you could do a lot worse than pick these up.
I should also add, Hugh Howey is a model for self publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but he managed to turnkey Amazon direct-to-Kindle printing into a multi-six-figure payout.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_%28series%29
2 http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Silo-Saga-ebook/dp/B00CYNGPTG