"Wool" by Hugh Howey (2013)

"When they reached one-thirty-nine together, Marck knew they'd made it.  His legs had somehow held out.  The blood loss hadn't stopped him.  With his wife helping him along, they passed the landing before Mechanical, and all he could think about was holding the line against those bastards who were taking shots at them from above.  Inside Mechanical, they would have power, safety in numbers, the advantage of home turf.  More importantly, they would be able to bandage wounds and get some rest.  That's what he sorely needed: rest."

Hugh Howey is an American writer of science fiction.  In the years since publishing Wool online in 2011, he's written many other books.  Two of these books are sequels to this one.

Wool imagines a future in which the remainder of humanity lives inside silos organized around a rigid, unchanging societal order.  Each silo is nominally run by a popularly elected mayor, and this mayor's decisions are enforced by a small group of sheriffs.  Countering the mayor's power is the head of IT, who both controls the silo's servers and retains a privileged knowledge of the silo's history.

All of which works out fine until an individual or individuals in any silo figure out how their silo really works.  The result of such a discovery is invariably violent revolution, and - as I'm sure you've already guessed - this is what happens in Wool.  In this particular instance a young woman from the bowels of the silo is elected to the post of sherriff, and what happens after her election involves a radical restructuring of her silo's society.

Aside from an overfondess for the word "quieten," Hugh Howey is a good writer.  His writing shows a polish you don't often see nowadays, and his command of the story he's telling makes plain the weaknesses of more technical authors like Andy Weir and Neal Stephenson.  In Wool it's the story that comes first, rather than the technical details.

In fact my only complaint about Wool is the way almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.  Someone's in trouble, oh no!  Cut to another part of the silo.  Take two steps back.  Do not pass "Go."  Oh no, someone's in trouble again!  Cut to three years ago.  On and on it goes.  A little of this would have been justified, but as it is it grows annoying toward the end of the book.  Creating suspense is fine, but after so many cliffhangers this tactic grows tiresome.

That said I consider Wool one of the best science fiction books I've read in some time.  I'm looking forward to reading the sequels.

Related Entries:

"Science Fiction Stories" edited by Edward Blishen (1988)
The Remembrance of Earth's Past Trilogy by Cixin Liu (2014)
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2016)
"Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson (2015)