Shift

Shift is the second book in the three-part Silo series by Hugh Howey. These books began as short stories and novellas published on Amazon that were compiled into full-length novels. The first book in the series is WOOL, followed by Shift and then Dirt. The books are now a series on Apple TV called Silo.

The series title refers to the 141-story underground buildings in which the characters live. The novels are set in a dystopian society designed by survivors of a nuclear strike that left the world outside their silos uninhabitable. WOOL is an acronym for the organization that designed and built the silos: the World Order Operation Fifty; the last letter in the acronym is L because it represents the Roman numeral for 50.

To fully benefit from this study guide and fully appreciate Shift, it’s helpful to have read the first book, WOOL, or at least know some key information from it. WOOL begins with the sheriff’s death. The sheriff’s deputy and the mayor begin looking for a new sheriff, focusing on Juliette Nichols, a woman who works in the bowels of the silo in an area known as Mechanicals. In exchange for becoming sheriff, Juliette requests a power holiday so that she can repair the silo’s generator. Unhappy with the idea of a power holiday, the head of IT, Bernard, kills the mayor and sentences Juliette to cleaning, a punishment that requires leaving the silo and cleaning IT’s cameras. Cleaners never return because the special suits they wear to protect them from the toxic environment always fail. Juliette goes out, but she learned that the suits IT supplies are made to fail, so she wears a better suit and doesn’t clean the cameras. Instead, she walks away, eventually stumbling upon another silo. After meeting the sole survivor of this other silo, a man who calls himself Solo, and reestablishing contact with her home silo, Juliette learns that there are a total of 50 silos—and that the people who built them caused the catastrophic events that led to the extinction of most of the world’s population. An uprising against IT occurs in Juliette’s home silo, and Bernard is killed. Juliette returns as mayor.

Shift’s timeline makes the book appear to be a prequel to WOOL. Most of the novel’s events occur in time periods 100 or 200 years before the opening of WOOL. However, because of the nature of the science fiction genre, this book actually advances the narration of WOOL by giving both background and supporting narrative that further progresses the story of WOOL and sets the stage for the next book in the series. Howey does this by allowing the main character of Shift, Donald Keene, to live an extraordinary life in which he has a hand in both creating the silos and guiding the events of WOOL as they begin to alter life inside the silos. In fact, the main character of WOOL, Juliette Nichols, appears in Shift as the defiant cleaner who escapes Silo 18. Other connections between Shift and the characters of WOOL include Shift’s revealing the full backstory of Solo in Silo 17 and the family connection between Sheriff Holston’s wife, Allison, and the wife of Mission Jones, Allie.