About Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey was born in North Carolina and worked as a yacht captain, bookstore employee, and various other jobs before self-publishing a short story called "Wool" on Amazon in 2012. The story was about people living in an underground silo who had been told the outside air would kill them. Readers demanded more. Howey wrote more. By the end of that year, the completed Wool omnibus was selling tens of thousands of copies per month as an ebook, and Simon & Schuster paid $500,000 for the print rights, in a deal notable because Howey retained his ebook rights — an unusual and influential milestone in self-publishing history.

The Silo series is a genuine achievement: propulsive, smart, character-driven science fiction in the post-apocalyptic mode that avoids the genre's usual clichs. The mystery of what's actually outside the silo unfolds across three novels without cheating the reader. Apple TV+ released an adaptation in 2023 starring Rebecca Ferguson, which is excellent and introduced the series to a new audience. If you came to the books through the show, the novels reward you with considerably more depth and a different (and better) resolution to several plot threads.