I just finished a pair of solid books, Hugh Howey’s science-fiction Dust, and Brendan Koerner’s non-fiction The Skies Belong to Us.
First, Dust is the sequel to Howey’s Wool, the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth where the human race lives in contained silos stretching over a hundred stories underground. The people inside have been told that the air outside is noxious, and that the only life to be lived is in these underground homes. It is dangerous to speak about the outside world and to question what the “authorities” say, and punishment for egregious offenses forces people outside “to clean” the sensors, eventually succumbing to the deadly air. People are slotted into various occupations (Mechanical, IT, Supply), reproduction is tightly controlled by a lottery system, and it is taboo to speak about the people and world before it was nearly destroyed. For me, I actually enjoyed Dust more than Wool, with the latter occasionally becoming bogged down in describing mechanical details about the silo and how things functioned. Dust did not delve into these details as much and focused much more on the characters, all for the better. In Dust, more light is cast on the ultimate authority of these silos, a puppetmaster so to speak, which could have represented multiple entities – God, a cold and ruthless modern corporation, or a nefarious Big Brother government. Ultimately, it is a story about the power of authority and whether we as a people question where that power is derived from, choosing to live as sheep or rebelling against the machine. Interestingly, Howey self-published his books and maintains the rights to publish his books electronically, while Simon & Schuster maintains the print rights (physical copies) to distribute the books throughout North America.
Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us, subtitled “Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking,” chronicles the epidemic of airline hijackings that primarily occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Koerner’s premise is that in an America roiling with unrest and ripped apart by the Vietnam War and the fading of 60s idealism, the desperate and disillusioned saw opportunities to become famous, to become rich, or simply find an audience for their protests and disparate views. The story centers on Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, a jaded Army veteran and a party girl, respectively, who manage to hijack a plane and escape across the ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom. They arrive in Algiers (capital of Algeria), where they are provided safe haven and become integrated with the International Section of the Black Panthers. They eventually make their way to France, where they are hailed as heroes by the French intelligentsia and feted by French movie stars and cultural icons. It is an interesting story about the world of flight before the TSA, metal detectors, security lines and checkpoints, and a time when airline hijackings were a nearly weekly occurrence. Definitely a page-turner and a story that helps you understand how air travel became how it is today.