Howey self-published the first novella, but you wouldn't know it. The writing is high quality, and the ending of the first section is spectacular. Howey builds a brilliant post-apocalyptic world with all of the known world living underground as a giant 'seed bank' ready to re-populate the Earth someday.
Queue the nit-picking.
Servers, generators, electricity, but no fricking lift in a 138-level underground metropolis? Seriously? As an aside, the porters with muscular legs charging up and down the worn metal steps reminded me of Ted Chiang's short story The Tower of Babylon. Apparently the lack of a lift is patched up as a population-control measure in the prequel First Shift - Legacy, which I just found out about and will go read next.
Along the same lines, the lens-cleaning seems a little contrived. A technologically advanced society with engineers and mechanics is going to realise pretty quickly that the lenses could be cleaned with wipers, not sacrificial humans. I get that it is ritualised punishment to keep control of the population, but it seems like just kicking them out the airlock would do the same job.
Spoilers ahead.
I thought poisoning the mayor was a pretty cheap trick. It seems unlikely that Bernard, evil head of IT, would play his hand so obviously when he knows that one misstep can easily destroy the silo. I also had trouble swallowing both Juliette's lackadaisical approach to investigating the mayor's assassination, and the public's acceptance of this approach by their new sheriff. Sure, maybe Juliette recognised Bernard had the upper hand, but the mayor was well liked by the public - why weren't they clamouring for justice?
Overall I liked Juliette as a character, the super-smart MacGyver of the silo, but could have done without the Romeo and Juliette references. Her foil, Lukas, starts out as a mysterious and intelligent stranger, and while I liked that he didn't turn out to be the perfect long-distance-cross-silo boyfriend, it was also pretty hard not to get sick of his point of view. It didn't help that Bernard's complete trust in Lukas was implausible. Why would Bernard give every tightly-held secret to somebody who publicly organised a petition for Juliette's release?
And speaking of IT, what the hell are the servers for exactly? Perhaps this will be revealed later. My immediate thought was that if they are for storing long-term human history, they should be on tape rather than spinning disk. But not enough has been revealed about the servers: maybe they have much more reliable online storage in this version of the future. Presumably some of the servers run silo equipment, although this seemed to be largely the domain of Mechanical, and there are apparently dozens of racks. Do the IT flunkies know what the servers are for?
But that's enough complaining, it really is a great book, and I couldn't put it down, especially during Juliette's underwater adventure.
One line of dialogue from Bernard did make me put it down, but only long enough to issue a Keanu-Reeves-style whoah.
"Silo one? This is silo eighteen."4.5 stars
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