Shift

Shift is a pointless prequel to the great dystopic world of Wool, choosing to put its focus on all the wrong places: instead of building on the fascinating discussions of its predecessor and crafting an engaging story, it decides to spend a lot of time explaining pointless things about its worldbuilding and grinding the pace to a halt with fan-service.

Initially, Shift follows two main characters: Troy and Donald. Troy is by far the most interesting of the two, being one of the few people responsible for managing the underground silos that guard the remains of human civilization in a devasted world: the one silo to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. When his brief shift is over, however, Troy must go back to cryo freeze and wait for his next one to start. Donald, on the other hand, is a politician whose story takes place before the world became uninhabitable, and who is assigned to build some silos in case the worst happens (as is often the case, the worst indeed happens).

What makes Troy the most intriguing point of view is that he’s going through a process of awakening: he is starting to open his eyes to the world around him and discover that it’s a dystopian one. The book’s opening passage perfectly symbolizes that, showing him waking up from the cryo freeze just to realize that he is in some kind of prison: “Troy returned to the living and found himself inside of a tomb. He awoke to a world of confinement, a thick sheet of frosted glass pressed near to his face.”

Troy quickly begins to see all the red flags in his society, noticing how he is not supposed to say certain things and question others, how the real truth is hidden behind official stories – the “allowed truth” –, and must not be sought in any way whatsoever, and how each one of the “shifters” looks and acts like they are just one more cog in the machine, unable to express their personality due to being fully consumed by work and duty: “Here, all he saw was stupor, dozens of communal rooms with movies playing in loops on flat-panel TVs, dozens of unblinking eyes in comfortable chairs. No one was truly awake. No one was truly alive.”

After an awakening, rebellion usually follows. So, Troy becomes paranoid, believing that he’s being watched, especially after he starts to defy the orders given to him – especially the small ones, like refusing to take a special medicine. He wants to find a way out, even though he can’t see one: awakening to the world’s problems, after all, is not a solution by itself, but just the first step of the process from which one realizes a solution must be found.

Donald, on the other hand, is the protagonist of a much simpler storyline. He’s at the beginning of his career, and so must follow the commands of the man who helped him during his campaign, a senator called Thurman. Senator Thurman can be considered the main villain of the story, not only because he is the one responsible for creating the unnecessarily-dystopian societies inside the silos, but because he still watches over them to maintain order. He is the mastermind behind everything, the character we’re supposed to hate and blame. To Donald, he often appears as a menacing figure: the moment Thurman enters a place the congressman is in, for example, is described as “A shadow fell into the room.”

The rub is that Donald’s point of view suffers from several problems. First, it shifts (pun woolfully intended) the narrative focus from the dystopian nature of the silos to conspiracy theories about the dangers of… nanotechnology, of all things. So, instead of building discussions about what turns a society ill, the book indulges in out-of-place warnings about some very specific piece of technology. The thing about post-apocalyptic worlds is that it doesn’t matter how they became that way – the reason, when it’s there, is brief and functions just as a general warning, if that. The point of these worlds is to show how humanity can survive now that the things we take for granted are no more  – and what that says about the society we currently live in. So, Shift is as if we got a The Lord of the Rings book about how Sauron got the materials to craft his ring and spent entire chapters following him forge the cursed object: it would be missing the whole point of the story.

The more the narrative of Shift tries to explain things the more foolish it becomes. And this is a big problem because Donald’s story in the book’s second act is still about explaining how everything became the way they are in the silos, going over every single detail. To make matters worse, it also tries to explain why people keep rebelling in a dystopian society – hint: the clue is in the premise – by trying to pinpoint a single reason for it. Therefore, when that reason is discovered, it inevitably sounds arbitrary, since societies are not simple constructs that can be reduced to a single problematic element of any kind.

And we still have to deal with the shallow characters surrounding Donald. Senator Thurman, for example, is a bland, obnoxious villain, since the more he opens his mouth to explain his motivations – the book is full of this kind of exposition – the less sense he makes. By the end, he looks like a delusional old white man who unfortunately happened to have too much power on his hands (in Shift’s defense, if one could pinpoint a single reason for why the world is in its current state, well, this is it). Meanwhile, Thurman’s daughter, Anna, has a thing for the protagonist and that’s basically her. She falls into the cliché of the manipulative woman who is trying to steal another’s husband and never goes beyond that: she seems to be defined by what she feels for Donald and by his rejection of her.

Another problem with Donald’s story is repetition. He is the type of character who doesn’t want to become what he is “meant to be” and every chance he gets – really, every chance – he laments about his own existence. He’s a gloomy character who never gets to offer something to compensate for his wearisomeness, not even being a very bright man: he takes too long to figure out Anna’s obvious intentions, for example. Donald is also desperately trying to understand what makes the silos go rogue but keeps reaching the same conclusions over and over again. And if he constantly rejects Thurman’s answers to why things are the way they are, he keeps asking the senator the same questions. Over and over again. The guy simply doesn’t make sense, Donald, get over it.

Besides Donald and Troy, the book also offers two other points of view. The first one is of a young man named Mission, who finds himself in the middle of an uprising in a silo. Mission’s story offers a bit of tension, chase sequences, and plot twists, but ultimately doesn’t have a purpose: the stories told in Wool were very similar in tone and theme and much better built.

The last point of view, of a boy named Jimmy, is the worst in the whole novel. It appears only in the book’s last act but has no momentum whatsoever. The narrative, for example, focuses on his cat’s behavior for more than four paragraphs when – and this is coming from a Jellicle critic, of all people – more important things should have been the priority:

“Other times, Jimmy found him standing in the corner where that man he’d shot all that time ago had wasted away. Shadow liked to sniff the rust stains and touch his tongue to the grating. It was for these freedoms that the hatch remained off.”

Good for the cat.

Jimmy’s plot is one of survival. He is a kid that managed to remain alive when his silo was purged and now must live alone, looking for food and water, and trying to avoid the other few survivors. The pace is slow to reflect the tediousness of his life and so nothing of interest happens for a while. But this means that the pacing of Shift’s story comes to a halt precisely when it should be proceeding forward in haste. His point of view is even full of cringe-worthy passages (“I am all alone,” he said. “I am solitude“), and ends up fulfilling the only purpose of being fan service: the “climax” is Jimmy meeting a character from the first book in a scene that… had already happened there.

Exciting stuff.

Focusing on unnecessary worldbuilding and fanservice, Shift is a disappointing follow-up to the great Wool. The book’s tagline read “Some secrets should remain buried,” which in hindsight certainly sounds like an unheeded warning about the whole project.

February 05, 2025.