EPTWool is an anomaly in the fiction world, because it's self-published. Hugh Howey isn't signed on to any publisher, and he sells the stories for just over $1 each on Amazon. (The Omnibus is available for $5.99.) Despite the odds, Wool has made the Amazon top 10 lists consistently across the sci-fi genre listings. The series has gained massive popularity and its author is now being championed as the prototype for the digital revolution in the book industry.
And there's a good reason he's sold so well. That reason is because he is a damn good writer, and Wool is a damn good series.
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The non-spoiler background of this series: Post-apocalyptic setting, where the outside world is completely uninhabitable. All that remains of humanity lives inside a massive underground "silo", which is very reminiscent of the Vaults from Fallout, but on a much larger scale. On the top floor of this 100+ floor silo, the walls are actually screens. These screens show the live feed from cameras outside the silo. They show the outside world - dead, lifeless, and with the skeletal remnants of a long abandoned city visible in the background.
Scattered across this landscape are the charred remains of human beings.
In the silo, talk of the outside is forbidden. Parents warn their children to never talk of such things, never even think of such things - because the instant someone expresses an interest in the outside, they are sent to "cleaning". This is a death sentence where the convicted person is suited up and sent outside the silo to clean the camera lenses that feed to the screen on the top floor. Soon after doing this, the toxic atmosphere will eat up the environmental suit and kill the cleaner. No-one knows why everyone sentenced to cleaning actually goes through with it - many on the eve of their exile have declared that they would never clean, but everyone eventually ends up doing it.
That's the background, the setting. But a setting is just an idea, and anyone can have an idea. What really makes this series great is, like any great work of fiction, the characters and the writing. Hugh Howey makes writing seem easy as he brings the silo to life. You'll get lost in the world, learning how the silo functions; about the lives of the mechanics in the lower levels, the porters who tirelessly but enthusiastically run things up and the central staircase, about the sheriffs in charge of law and order, and about the shadowy levels of IT, where servers run day and night processing who-knows-what.
The story moves forward briskly - according to an interview I read, the author believes that the short novella format means that he doesn't have to pad the middle of a story with filler - with plenty of action, and twists and turns. You'll meet great characters, some whom you'll fall in love with, some whom you'll despise (but with an understanding of why they do what they do).
It's just a great, great work of fiction. The five stories together, available as an Omnibus, is about the length of a regular novel. It's dirt cheap and available digitally on Amazon.
