There are a lot of reasonably good sci-fi shows available for streaming nowadays. Two factors contribute to the abundance: a rich vein of science fiction stories can be tapped for source material, and special effects have gotten cheap and easy enough that these futuristic worlds can be realized on-screen with live action. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed The Expense series—both the TV show and the books—, Altered Carbon, and The Martian. I’m looking forward to what Netflix does with The Three-Body Problem.
So Silo on Apple TV+ fits into the same mold, in adapting a recent piece of science fiction into a live-action TV series1. The source material is a series of short stories written in the early 2010s; they’re compiled into 3 books—Wool, Shift, Dust—that collectively narrate a world where humanity lives in a giant underground silo 144 stories tall, afraid to venture outside because of poison in the air.
Post-apocalypse is well-worn territory in science fiction, and this specific subgenre of bunker survival and emergence has been explored repeatedly, in games like Horizon: Zero Dawn and the Fallout series and in other books and TV shows like The 1002. The setups are similar, in that some global catastrophe triggers a mass extinction event, and so a small group of humans find shelter in a secure and isolated location to wait out the negative effects of the event across years, decades, or even centuries. Over the long timeframes, memories of that previous world fade into myth, and mysteries naturally develop around the triggering event and the survivors’ forebearers. Along the way, some of the engagement comes from harkening to an advanced technological distant past, which also happens to align with current or near-future levels of technology. As the reader/viewer/gamer, this results in a unique juxtaposition of recognition and nostalgia.
The Silo series follows many of these same tropes; where it differs from other established works is the explicit and overt addition of politics into the sci-fi equation. Whereas other stories emphasize science or technology or highlight the explorative aspects of their worlds, the citizens of Silo are strongly bound by their Pact: a constitution-like founding document that defines strict roles, rules, and processes that govern every aspect of society. There are regular votes for mayor, lines of succession for political appointees, and materials deemed illegal with clear handling instructions. Of course, such a society develops a discriminatory class system, reinforced by the physical structure of the silo itself: elites up top, professionals in the middle, laborers, and the riffraff stuck on the bottom.
The scenario crafted presents a rich tapestry for exploring politics and human psychology, though closer to a Lord of the Flies-level derived from first principles as opposed to a Game of Thrones-style of multiplex factions. The science here is fairly weak; it repeatedly references computing as it existed in the late-90s/early-2000s. It reads less as a stylistic choice3, but more as a reflection of when the author wrote their first short story, around 2011; my suspension of disbelief was challenged when our society, having developed the means to construct and maintain giant silos that would sustain multiple generations, would also choose to continue to entertain itself with…Windows Solitaire.
All that makes Silo a blend of multiple genres of fiction. Science fiction creates the backdrop; political drama encase the environment and its characters; murder mysteries drive the plot. It’s also surprisingly brutal; characters are maimed or killed as a matter-of-fact, not built-up to be devastatingly torn down like Game of Thrones, but few fairy tale heroics either. The plot does slow down into a grind through the second book and into parts of the third, but the central mystery and its resolution do pay off in the end—although if you do read through all the books, the MASSIVE SPOILERS supplemental blog post from the author does help close some of the plot holes.
For more classic sci-fi, there’s the Foundation show, also on Apple TV+↩
That world featured a space bunker.↩
