The plot of First Shift is split into two parallel story lines, one in the year 2049 that explains how the silos came to be, and one in 2110 that follows the Mayor of Silo 1.
Howey spectacularly nails the 2110 section. We discover that those notionally 'in charge' of the whole mad scheme are as equally enslaved as everyone else, with a very 1984 feel. You really don't want to face the wrong way at lunch.
Maybe he wasn't there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.
For some reason the notion of waking up out of cold sleep into a world where everything was exactly the same but older and more worn each time resonated with me, and I could imagine how uneasy it made Troy feel:
It was unnerving to note the signs of wear in the carpet and the patch of dull steel in the middle of the turnstile where thighs had rubbed against it over the years. These were years that didn't exist for Troy. This wear and tear had shown up as if by magic.
It was also strange to think of whole generations being born and dying between shifts in Silo 1. This was highlighted by Troy's interactions with other Silos becoming increasingly difficult as language diverged from the original English spoken in Silo 1.
Where the story is weakest is the explanation of how we got to the silos in the first place. I thought the general idea was OK, but not great: the US goes scorched earth first in the face of a possible nanotechnology attack. If you're talking crazy strategies, it seems like nuking and selectively nano-attacking every other country on the planet would make more sense. Sure, build your silos, but at least the outside isn't super-toxic.
I think Howey was arguing that once a nano-enabled weapon is released it is impossible to control and would destroy the world, but targeting nano machines to individual humans and races was observed to be possible in the book. It seems you could inoculate the US population with some sort of chemical/biological safety signal that the nanos would respect.
All that aside, the main problem with the 2049 story-flow was that it was too near-future to be plausible. The US government and society seems exactly as it is now in 2012.
So given 2012 norms: tens of thousands of workers, politicians, engineers and construction workers would have known exactly what was being built. Getting funding for the cover-story project would be impossible, and getting a politician with some architecture book-learning to design the whole thing because he's gullible and good at keeping a secret is simply farcical. Also, ensuring all the right people (only Democrats???) are present at the silos at the critical moment would have been impossible without leaking some parts of the plan.
I would have been much more happy with this whole plot line if it was further in the future where US society had become dysfunctional and the government was collapsing or defunct.
To address a nit I had from the first 5 books, Howey explains that the lack of a lift is a requirement pushed on the silos by the psyches, but I still don't buy that a technology and engineering savvy society is not going to come up with a custom solution that is better than a staircase. Blocking such improvements would be difficult without moving to a state of overt population control.
But hey, it's still a great book, and now I'm waiting for the next one :)
4 stars.
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