Shift is dystopian fiction with a twist - several twists, really. But the complications emerge slowly, building suspense all the while. Predictably, this inconvenient fact will complicate the story and loom large down the line. We soon learn that Keene, now happily married, was once engaged to the Senator’s daughter. Donald Keene is a freshman Congressman elected from Georgia with the help of “the great Senator Thurman.” As a freshman, he finds himself at loose ends as he casts about for meaningful work when the Senator recruits him for a top-secret job that engages his background as an architect. Along the way readers learn the grim explanation for the origin of the Silo. Shift - the three books that together constitute the prequel to Wool - carries readers from the mid-21st century for several hundred years until its central character is about to cross paths with the principal actor in the future world portrayed in Wool.

Howey explores the traditions, mores and laws necessary to protect this remnant of humanity from the creative urges and deep desires which always seek to push beyond the safe confines of the silo into the unknown.Hugh Howey debuted with a big splash as a science fiction writer with the publication of Wool. This three-part dystopian novel (really, a novella plus two full-length books) tells the tale of the Silo, an underground city of several thousand future Americans that descends through 144 stories into the earth. Yet despite hundreds of years, the occupants still long to explore, to expand their horizons. Tens of thousands of people are packed into a silo buried in the Earth, protected from the toxic atmosphere which surrounds it. What would human beings be like if for several hundred years they had been forced to live in a giant container, a refuge from the destruction of the planet? Would we recognize them? Would they have changed? Would we understand their concerns and desires? Our ubiquitous human nature and some of its seemingly unchanging characteristics are major themes in Howey’s Wool. Without giving away any spoilers, each story has its own resolution, adds clarity and answers questions from the last, but then creates some larger questions: Shift (books 6-8) are a prequel to Wool (books 1-5), Dust is the conclusion.

He continued the story with four more installments, which now comprise the Omnibus edition of Wool. The dystopian science fiction series developed out of a single novella Hugh Howey self-published on the Web in 02011.

Science fiction author Hugh Howey donated to the Manual for Civilization a one-off hard cover set of his Silo Saga with a special title page for The Long Now Foundation.

Manual For Civilization Hugh Howey's Dystopian Silo Saga Joins the Manual for Civilization

Shift omnibus edition