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The hit Apple TV sci-fi series “Silo” is set in the distant future after some sort of apocalyptic cataclysm has struck the world. The series takes place in a massive underground silo that houses about 10,000 people and is 144 floors tall, striated by caste. The working classes live way at the bottom while the “elites” live near the top. People have been living in the silo for so long, they no longer remember what happened to the world that forced them underground in the first place.
The series has been a huge hit for Apple TV, having just completed its third season. The fourth is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2027. The series has been nominated for a few Emmys, and boasts an impressive cast, led by Rebecca Ferguson.
As the show’s fans can tell you, “Silo” is based on a series of novels by author Hugh Howey, who self-published the very first “Silo” novel, “Wool,” in 2011. He followed that with “Shift” and “Dust,” both in 2013, and Howey has been a darling in the sci-fi community ever since, having written additional series and a few standalone novels. His book “Beacon 23” was even adapted into a short-lived TV series of its own. Howey, like all authors, goes on record often with his favorite books and movies, eager to recommend titles to his fans. On his website, he recommends the 1990 adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
On “The Tim Ferriss Show” in 2024, Howey also talked about a unique queer sci-fi novel that he says actually made him a better writer. Howey is very fond of the 2019 novel “This is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. And the premise is wild.
Hugh Howey loves the book This is How You Lose the Time War
“This is How You Love the Time War” is one that Hugh Hefle admits to picking up often. “[I]t’s short,” he said, “and it’s one of those that you could just pick up and read again to remind yourself what writing can sound like.” Howey admitted that, before he sits to write, he likes to read some of his favorite authors to get in the mood. “It’s almost like striking a tuning fork before your writing session,” he said. He elucidated on this practice by saying:
“You can read stuff that’s nonsense but beautiful, like some Proust. And you can just turn to any part of Proust, it’s all the same. The beginning of the story reads just like the middle of the story. But the way a good translation of Proust flows, that iambic pentameter, the run-on sentences, it’s like you start to hear the tonal quality of good music in words, and then you can start to sing in that key yourself. Some of the books I’ve read recently that have I think upped my writing, one was ‘This Is How You Lose the Time War.'”
Equating Marcel Proust’s multi-volume classic “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” to a modern sci-fi novel is high praise indeed. Proust, for those who haven’t read it, was hugely prolific and wrote his classic as a prolonged rumination on memory, sleep, and life in general.
“Time War” is about two time-traveling war agents, named merely Red and Blue, who work on either side of a vicious conflict between opposing empires. They travel throughout various timelines and universes, altering events in their respective sides’ favors.
This is How You Lose the Time War is a queer time-travel epistolary
But “This is How You Lose the Time War” is also a romance. The two agents start out leaving each other mocking notes about their time-travel successes, but the notes eventually become flirty. Before long, the two women have fallen in love.
When their romance is discovered, naturally it forces the two agents’ respective bosses to end it. There are assassination orders and the like. But then, this is a time travel story, so one can travel into the past and undo anything that might affect the present. The novel is presented in an epistolary format, with Max Gladstone writing all of Red’s letters, and Amal El-Mohtar writing Blue’s. The book alternates between them. According to a Strange Horizons article, the book was written as an exquisite corpse, with each author finishing their portion before turning it over to the next author, sight unseen. They kind of improvised the story this way.
Hugh Howey said that the fashion in which the book was written was key to its success. “Alternated back and forth,” he said, “which is structural to the story, which works.” El-Mohtar would go on to write the 2025 novel “The River Has Roots,” while Gladstone had previously written the Craft Sequence series of fantasy novels and published three Craft Wars books from 2023 to 2025. There’s plenty to explore between the two authors, although “Time War” is the only one they have written together. It won a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award. It’s easily obtained.
