If you believe Hugh HoweyTV series adaptation of his post-apocalyptic book trilogy silo may never be released, despite millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work AppleTV+ was thrown into production. Sure, the dystopian drama—starring Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, and Rashida Jones and produced by justifiable creator Graham Yost—has a release date of May 5 and the show has premiered at Cannes and in London, but the author is not yet ready to call it a done deal.
“Honestly,” Howey said, “it’s still a gradual process. I think it will come to me on June 30, the day the last episode aired. Even when I walked into the set of the show for the first time in the UK, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, are we really doing this?’”
It was an understandable feeling, given silothe long way to the screen. The series first appeared through a short story, “Wool,” in 2011, gradually growing in size, scope, and popularity as more of Howey’s worlds began to open up through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. In 2012, it was picked up by 20th Century Fox and made into a film, with Ridley Scott as one of the producers. That deal was thwarted due to Disney’s acquisition of Fox, and the project shuffled into a series of limbo at AMC.
A few years later, it moved to Apple TV+ again, where Yost, Ferguson and director Morten Tyldum (Imitation game) has been attached and the rest is history. This month, fans will be thrust into a world of underground crime, conspiracy and falsehood, all buried underground. WIRED spoke to Howey about siloslong pregnancy, recent wave of mania AIand why people get astigmatism fever.
WIRED: You are working on a potential silo adaptation for more than a decade now. How does it feel to finally have this in the world?
Hugh Howey: For the past week, I’ve been really excited. In the past, I used to worry about satisfied readers, and about whether we could get satisfied ones. Not familiar with the books interested in the program. But about a week ago, I started getting the first messages from people who watched all 10 episodes and everyone who contacted me raved about it.
You have written a lot about artificial intelligence, including part you did for WIRED. Where are you with AI now?
I think there’s a mixture of excitement and fear right now, but I’m leaning more towards excitement. I think the people I talked to who were scared didn’t realize this was going to happen.
It’s really exploded in the public consciousness over the past few months, but that’s what you’ve done thinking for many years.
I’ve been writing and blogging about this for a while now, although I say I don’t know what the timing will be. I think on my blog three or four years ago I said that in the next 10 years a computer will write a book that is indistinguishable from a human author’s book. Some people don’t believe it, and so they’re really scared now, while I’ve slowly grown more comfortable with the idea for over a decade.
