Shift

Shift is the sequel to Wool which I read earlier this year. In Wool we saw a few months in a post-apocalyptic world where what's left of humanity is cooped up in a great underground complex (a silo) with a hidden rottenness somewhere at the centre of their society. When I wrote about that book I said it was clear that despite the reveals we hadn't quite got to the heart of it yet, and Shift gets there.

It starts before, in a world that's almost our own, a future only 50 or so years away. In the middle of a familiar world there's a few technological advances that matter to the story - nanotech is a reality, cryogenics too & there are drugs that make you forget traumatic events. Through the book we mostly follow Donald Keene, who's a newly elected Congressman pulled into a top secret project designing & building an underground bunker - he's told it's a safety feature to go next to some nuclear waste disposal facilities. His story is interspersed with other stories of events between this near future and the time of Wool. At the end of the book we see some of the events from the end of Wool from the other side - and they look different form this perspective. So I think we now know what's rotten at the centre of this world, and book three is going to be what our protagonists from both Wool & Shift do about it.

Click the link below for my full review.