Hugh Howey

Bestselling author of Wool and other books. Currently sailing around the world.

A few questions from Moyukh of Australia

I’m writing the Molly Fyde series with readers of all ages in mind, but I really get excited thinking about the young adults that might pick up these books. Science fiction has always been tops for posing tricky ethical dilemmas, some of them just around the corner. As much as I enjoy positive reviews and endorsements from famous writers, it’s going to be letters from young adult readers that I most look forward to. This morning, I received an email from Moyukh, a student in Australia. He is writing a…

Over halfway there…

Another revelation from The Reader (the device that houses my Molly Fyde source material) has shaken me to the core this week. It’s rare that anything can upstage the events of Molly’s life; but this tidbit, revealed through a conversation Molly preserved in her journal, is as big as it gets. And it explains two gaping holes in the standard cosmological model. As tight as the Big Bang model seemed last century, the theory has required extensive modification during my lifetime. The formation of the theory was simple enough: it…

Back to the Research

After being consumed by my research into Molly’s life for half a year, I expected the dissemination of her work to provide a much-needed respite. The opposite has been the case. Delving into the nasty world of book publishing has me longing for a return to The Reader and my editing of the second entry in her narrative. There are so many other people out there selling science fiction that my science fact is lost in the noise. And how can a story, no matter how adventurous and bizarre, compete…

The Starship Parsona

Wow. Just… wow. Document #3,549,018. Why in the world such a vital piece of evidence would be so deep in The Reader, have no searchable tags, and not be active-linked to any other document is beyond me. It’s almost as if the schematic was slipped in at the last minute, with no time to reference it elsewhere. The first thing I did was go back to every description of the ship that I’d already tagged. It all conforms perfectly to the layout seen here. I have no reason to believe…

The Impossible Map

I’ll never forget the day I showed Dr. Lisa Robinson, one of my astronomer friends at NASA, what has since become known as “The Impossible Map.” We were having lunch together in the cafeteria near KSC HQ (the hub of Kennedy Space Center’s inland industrial area) when I showed her The Reader for the first time. As I’ve said before, this project drove me batty from the first week, and I think Lisa was worried about her old friend. I was flipping through documents and talking excitedly about what I’d…