Relics out of history: adapting Hugh Howey's WOOL into Apple TV+'s Silo

A cursory examination of Apple TV+’s televisual futures reveals a desire for alternate worlds and histories. There are texts that dream for multiversal roads not travelled, alternate histories of the space race that revive American exceptionalism, and adaptations of canonical sf texts concerned with shortening the interregnum between the fall of one civilisation and the rise of another, and revolutionary impulses against technocratic, oligarchic dystopias. Many of these texts are adaptations, articulating a desire to re-experience the utopian impulses of the sf form. But these are often sold back to us, to quote Mark Fisher, ‘only as a frozen aesthetic, never as an ideal for living’ (8). However, this leaves little room for the transformative function of adaptation to re-contextualise texts for the current milieu. To trace this tension, this paper argues, first, that Hugh Howey’s Silo sequence of short stories produces what Mark Fisher describes as an eerie affect. It will then explore the adaptational choices made by Graham Yost and Apple TV+ that shift the emphasis from the eerie to the weird in the first season of their 2023 adaptation.

If you have ever, like me, downloaded your Google or Apple cloud storage onto a hard drive, or, like my parents, gone through old hard drives and discovered troves of old family photos, then you will also have created a relic of the kind that is central to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Howey’s Silo sequence. Howey’s stories feature many characters that each contribute to social change. Collective action exposes the social norms and taboos that subtly condition behaviour. In the series, however, this consciousness-raising mechanism is provided by the relics that threaten a surveillance state controlled by violence and fear.

I read this shift in emphasis, using the language of Mark Fisher, as a movement away from the eeriness of the short stories toward a focus on the relics as weird objects. The weird, writes Fisher, ‘involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here’ (15). Fisher goes on to say that ‘The weird is marked by an exorbitant presence…The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence’ (61). The eerie raises fundamentally existential questions: ‘Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?’ (12).

The world of the Silo presents an eerie inversion of presence and absence. Divided approximately into three sections, the up-top, the mids, and the down-deep, the eponymous Silo is a 144-level underground facility that contains the survivors of an apocalyptic event that rendered the atmosphere toxic and the Earth uninhabitable.  Sealed off from the outside, the Silo is the last bastion of humanity as far as we, and the people inside, know. This is typical of the eerie landscapes Fisher describes as being ‘partially emptied of the human’ (11). They are gone but their traces remain. Ruins are a prominent feature of the eerie, markers that outline the absence of a former presence.

The Silo’s eeriness is also produced by its lack of history. Collective memory extends back only 140 years when the last Great Rebellion wiped the servers. No one knows who built the Silo or what happened to the world. In both texts, the Silo’s society is maintained by mechanisms of social control, such as that it’s cheaper to send physical messages via porter rather than to send an email.

In the series, the social conditioning is distilled into the dictum that opens the first episode. Sheriff Holston, played by David Oyelowo, narrates:

The eerie raises fundamentally existential questions: ‘Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?’ (The Weird and the Eerie, 12).

This dictum reconfigures the questions of agency and existence that Fisher argues are prompted by the eerie: ‘what happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of agent is acting here? And is there an agent at all? (11). Transforming the questions into statements acknowledges the lack of collective history as a means of submitting to ignorance. The Silo’s unknown ‘founders,’ as they are called in the series, hope to maintain the fragile equilibrium of the Silo by denying the eerie outside. Through the use of propaganda, such as the ‘Freedom day’ festivities of episode 1, and controlling the computer technology, the head of IT maintains the founders’ designs of a society in stasis, absent of historical thinking. Without the ability to question their past, the people of the Silo are stuck in a perpetual present, their behaviour constrained within a narrow range of acceptability.

It is not so easy to erase a people’s history, however; everyone is connected to someone else. By focalising through different characters within and between the short stories, Howey evokes a sense of momentum steadily building toward social change. The first story features the Silo’s sheriff, Holston, following in the footsteps of his wife, Alison, who was sent to clean three years ago. The second sees Mayor Jahns and Deputy Marnes follow Holston’s recommendation and appoint Juliette, an engineer from the down-deep, as Sheriff. In the stories, Mayor Jahns appoints Juliette because of her future-oriented thinking. Jules convinces the mayor to sanction the first power holiday—shutting down the main generator to provide a permanent fix – because, as she says, ‘If the goal ain’t for ever, we should pack our bags right now’ (91). She believes in the community of the Silo, but her future-oriented thinking is concerned only with mechanical fixes initially. It is the kinship she feels with Holston, being in his job, the loss of Mayor Jahns who believed in her, and her outrage at Bernard, the head of IT, whom she suspects is responsible, taking Jahn’s job as acting mayor that shifts her focus from mechanical to social changes.

Juliette is closer to being the protagonist in the show than in the stories. While still a central figure in the first five short stories, which is republished as the novel WOOL, the work of social change is shared not only by Alison, Holston, Mayor Jahns, Deputy Marnes but also mechanical engineers Marck, Shirly, Knox, and Walker; IT techs, Scottie and Lukas; and the survivor, Solo. By sharing focalisation between these characters, each using their skillset to learn and share more information, the short stories formally embody the importance of consciousness-raising for collective action.

The series, however, displaces the interest in consciousness-raising from the form to the content through its invention of the relics. The relics are items from the beforetimes – leftovers from Silo’s construction. They range from objects as benign as a Pez dispenser, a shuttlecock, or the ‘Amazing Adventures in Georgia: a travel guide for kids’, to more dangerous tech like a video camera and a hard drive. Rather than the source texts’ preoccupation with the ideological and emotional bonds between people, the series centres these relics as mechanisms of social change; I see this as Apple’s adaptation shifting its mode from the eerie to the weird. In Fisher's words, ‘the weird is that which does not belong’ (10). The Pez lolly dispenser produces a weird affect through its incongruity with the world of the Silo. It has no use-value when it is stripped of its context. Discussing the titles of Lovecraft’s stories, Fisher identifies the phrase ‘out of’ as central to his definition of the weird, and it is this concept that I borrow for my title. Instead of simply meaning ‘from’, Fisher identifies two other important definitions, ‘cut out’ and ‘beyond’. The Silo’s relics are cut out of history, and without their context, their meaning and use-values are obscured.

For Fisher, ‘fascination’ is an ‘integral concept of the weird itself—the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention’ (17). In the show, this fascination is possessed by George, played by Ferdinand Kingsley, who is in love with Juliette, portrayed by Rebecca Ferguson. Instead of existing only as an eerie absence that haunts Jules, George’s fascination with the relics gives him a much bigger part in the show. The series often focalises through Jules—using analepses prompted by the relics—to depict her relationship with George, as well as Juliette’s investigation with Holston into George’s death. These analepses show how the relics replace the feeling of collectivity evoked by the short stories. George unlocks the secrets of the hard drive relic with the Sherif’s wife, Alison, entangling Holston’s loss with Juliette’s.

George enjoys the relics because they are linked to people who imbued them with meaning:

Jules initially mocks George’s fascination because she doesn’t see their use-value. The watch’s symbolic meaning when it is all Jules has left of George. It is inextricably connected to her memory of him, so that it provokes remembrance as a memento while also being a physical talisman of his love. Some part of that love remains imbued in the watch.  

George’s experience of the relics’ residual meaning is one of the numinous—a concept that Fisher ‘rescue[s]…from the religious’ (156). Quoting Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Fisher’s numinous is that ‘which ‘come(s) sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship” (156). Jules describes the numinous as a lingering ‘light’ that persists with the object despite its weirdness. She observes how this light is transferable; George’s fascination allows him to take it in, and she, then, experiences it through her love for him. In the series, then, it is the relics that capture some of the collectivist charge that defines the mood of Howey’s stories.

This numinous affect is particularly evident when Jules and her deputy Paul Billings, played by Chinaza Uche, discover the kids travel guide separately. The travel guide provides clues to life before the Silo, which shows forests, rivers, and beaches, and teaches about marine wildlife, the night sky, and the local cities—alien concepts that produce a weird numinosity for those who discover it. The image of the beach produces this affect most strongly. It haunts George’s Aunt Gloria, who dreams of it in her medically induced hallucinations. And, although Deputy Billings burns the book, he tears out the beach page first.

Deputy Billings burns it because the Silo’s administrators view it as an existential threat. The travel guide possesses a consciousness-raising potential because it suggests a logic of alterity, an alternate world with an alternative world logic to the heavily conditioned and tightly controlled society in the Silo. This sense of wrongness is predicated on a contrast between what Fisher calls the ‘terrestrial-empirical’ reality, the mundane everyday inside the Silo, and the eerie outside. The travel guide’s colourful imagery produces this weird affect because it shows and teaches about the world before, and, in doing so, shows what their society lacks: answers. Asking questions and learning about the world outside was not taboo. The presence of weird objects, Fisher argues, causes us to re-evaluate our understanding of the world. He writes, ‘The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate’ (15). If the series follows the source text, the consciousness-raising power of education will continue to be drawn out.

If we agree with Michael Szalay that Apple’s intervention into the streaming space is a more surreptitious form of advertising, then the content of its shows is irrelevant to the overarching goal of perpetual growth. Apple is also comfortable being a platform that can integrate a critique of itself. As Fisher outlines, it is a prime example of capitalist realism feeding off its own critiques. He writes, ‘What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their pre-corporation: that pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture’ (9). But, as Matt Seybold points out, Apple will eventually need to shift its primary revenue stream away from iPhone sales due to market saturation. Set up to replace it is what Apple calls their ‘services,’ which includes Apple care, Apple TV+, and significantly, iCloud storage. According to Seybold, services is currently their second biggest revenue stream. As more people are reliant on cloud services, control over what Yanis Varoufakis has called ‘cloud capital’ is increasingly important. But, as Silo demonstrates, there is a risk in handing over our data, our digital histories, to only a few companies. As events as recent as last Friday have shown, technological vulnerabilities in companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google persist despite their size and power. If the Microsoft outage had also affected cloud data, how much personal and collective history would have been lost? If it had been what Matt Seybold terms a ‘cloud crash,’ would we be left in a similar situation to the Silo?

If we agree with Fisher that cloud ‘capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable’ (16), then Apple’s adaptation of Howey’s stories, shifting the emphasis from the eerie to the relics as weird objects, highlights the contemporary anxiety that our culture is sliding towards a technocratic oligarchy that inscribes, in Seybold’s words, ‘fealty to power that offers no plausible record of its own origin.’ The Silo texts prompt us to reconsider our relationship with platforms like Apple.

The changes made by the adaptation, making the forms of social control more violent and explicit, increasing the role of technology and the surveillance state, and casting Juliette as the protagonist rather than as part of a collective, loses some of the charge of the source texts’ preoccupation with collective action. But the series’ focus on the relics informs us that merely elucidating forms of social control is not enough. As Juliette realises in episode 10, against the totalising hegemony of a technocratic oligarchy, ‘we never had a chance.’  And yet the final images of season 1 retain the source’s utopian impulse, captured in the relentless horizon displayed on giant screens. She does what no one else has; she walks over the hill. Disappearing into the eerie elsewhere, Juliette demonstrates to the people in the Silo that crossing the horizon is only a matter of perspective.