We are almost biologically programmed to expect stories to have a beginning, middle, and end. Trilogies are such natural frameworks for stories. And while that book was becoming an international bestseller, I laid out the two books to follow. I saw a path to turn the initial story into a novel. But the demand was overwhelming for more in that world, so I took up the challenge. I put it online for 99 cents and went back to writing another novel.

It was never supposed to be a single novel! It all started as a short story, just fifty or so pages. Was it always intended to become a trilogy or did it just flow naturally into three novels?

And the story reflects my opinion that the world is best known through direct interaction, and we should dare to hope that it’s better than what we see on our screens. The opening line of WOOL captures this dichotomy. A decade prior, I was in a really poor part of Cuba and had noticed the same thing: kids playing in the same areas that adults are feeling worn out and run down. We were staying in a convent and walking to work every day through a rough part of town, and what I noticed most was kids everywhere playing in the streets. Around the same time, I took a group of college kids up to Harlem to work in a soup kitchen for a week. I also noticed how much social media we were starting to consume, and how much our view of the world was suddenly coming from screens rather than going out and seeing things with our own eyes. It was around 2009 or so that I found myself working in a college bookstore, and I noticed more and more people walking around staring at their phones. The initial germ of an idea had come a year or two earlier. How did you first come up with the idea for the Wool series? What was your inspiration? Howey was kind enough to do an interview with me, where he talks about Wool, Waterworld, Wayfinding, and his favorite post-apocalyptic media (of course!). Or you can wait until (probably) 2023 for the show (which will star Rebecca Ferguson and Tim Robbins). I was lucky enough to read Wool in 2021 (as well as the sequels Shift and Dust) and loved them, so if you haven’t read them yet, they will please anyone who is a fan of the genre (they’re also available on audiobook, though only on Audible). Wool is unusual in that Howey managed to sell the print rights to Simon & Schuster (something that rarely happens to indie publishers). It follows the story of Jules, an engineer living in a self-contained silo-bunker in a post-apocalyptic Earth, and her journey to discover why they can’t go outside. If you’re unaware, Wool began in 2011 as a self-published short story (also called “Wool”), which was later published together with four sequel novellas as a novel under the same name. Understandably, we at Post Apocalyptic Media are big fans of the post-apocalyptic Wool books and are waiting eagerly for the Apple+ series adaptation.

Hugh howey