First Shift - Legacy by Hugh Howey

Much like excruciating stomach cramps may be a sign that deadly nanobots are eating you from the inside, a proliferation of subtitles usually means that a good story is being gobbled up by the franchise it spawned. With the subtitles come the world-building, the fan-built wiki and the most dreaded thing of all: A self-replicating, never ending swarm of books and spin-offs. Juliette replacing a a rubber gasket on one line of Wool is now an Epic Saga of no less than fourteen books. It was therefore with a sigh that I noticed that Howey, not one to go for half measures, bounces straight from the four-letter Wool to the almost comical First Shift: Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo series) (Wool). Oh dear. I'm never buying that.

First Shift - Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo series) (Wool)
Hugh Howey

ISBN: 1475154771
Broad Reach Publishing, 2012
English

A follow-up to Wool Omnibus. Like Wool, when you've cut away the junk, what remains is good. But you'll be cutting a lot. (3/5)

Yet here I am, admitting to my purchase by reviewing that very same book. The thing is, I've got Hugh Howey all figured out. His books may be a waste, but as I wrote in my review of Wool, the scenes are masterful. Like a man who goes to an all-you-can-eat buffet just to get the single amazing dish he knows he can't get anywhere else, I gladly pay the $7 for that.

FS:L(P6S)(W) is, as one would expect, a mess from a story point of view. Things happen, but for reasons that make no sense and should probably have been left unexplained so the reader's eyes didn't run such a risk of rolling clean out of their skull in disbelief.

When viewing the book a series of vignettes, however, it is amazing. Like an Escher painting[a], where each part makes sense individually but the whole is surreal, there are scenes​[1] in the book that draw you in to another world and hold you there with such force that upon finishing you feel like having woken up from one of those dreams that felt so real.

Cut away the junk, and what remains is good. Legacy is a five star book; First Shift: Legacy (Part 6 of the Silo series) (Wool) isn't.

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