Adaptations, made and unmade

Howey was working in a small independent bookshop in the North Carolina mountains, for $300 a week, when he published Wool through Kindle Direct Publishing in July 2011. He had carried the idea for years and meant it as a novel. What he put out was a short story, written in a few sittings, which he says he “tossed on the Kindle store for 99 cents”, a brief detour before his next book.

Readers wanted more. He wrote the next three parts during National Novel Writing Month that November, and Proper Gauge, Casting Off and The Unraveling were out by Christmas Day. The fifth, The Stranded, as long as a short novel and prompted by readers’ reviews, followed in January 2012, and the Wool Omnibus gathered all five that month. In January alone Howey sold about 23,000 copies and reached number one on Amazon’s science-fiction list. Early that year the serial held six of that list’s top ten places.

By May 2012 the e-books had sold more than 140,000 copies in under six months, and on May 16 a single Deadline report carried two deals: the film rights to Fox (below), and UK and Commonwealth rights to Random House’s Century imprint after a five-way auction. American publishers wanted the e-books too. Howey turned down seven-figure offers that would have taken them, and in December 2012 Publishers Lunch reported a print-only deal with Simon & Schuster (worth around half a million dollars, the Wall Street Journal later reported): the hardcover and paperback came out together on March 12, 2013, and Howey kept the e-book. It was the e-book sales that brought the studios and the print houses; Shift’s three parts (2012–13) and Dust (2013) followed, first as Howey’s own e-books.

In May 2012 Deadline described a stampede of bidders for Wool, Lionsgate among them. 20th Century Fox won the film rights, with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free and Steven Zaillian’s Film Rites lined up to produce. That November Fox was negotiating with J Blakeson to direct. By June 2015 Nicole Perlman had been hired to rewrite Blakeson’s script, and, TheWrap reported, no one was attached to direct.

The same month Howey wrote that the option would expire in October 2015, and he cut his e-book prices to $2.99 in the hope of giving the film a push. It was not made. In his own account, written in 2021, Fox commissioned two scripts he admired and attached a few directors, and around 2016 he got the rights back.

There is a second version of the story. Wikipedia says the film was shelved because Disney bought 21st Century Fox, citing a 2019 Digital Spy list of Fox films dropped after the takeover that does not mention Wool. That deal closed in 2019, years after Howey says the rights had come home, and by 2018 a television version was already in development elsewhere. This page follows Howey.

In June 2013 Howey opened the silo to other writers officially. Readers had been inventing silos of their own since 2012, with his encouragement. Now Amazon’s Kindle Worlds licensed the “Silo Saga”, and when the program went live on June 27 a Wool story was, Howey reported, the first one accepted. By the time Kindle Worlds closed in 2018 it held 122 Silo works, the third most of any licensed world. Wikipedia names Fredric Shernoff, Jason Gurley and Michael Bunker among the writers who found some success through it, though none came near Wool’s.

The comic was announced the next month. In July 2013 Jet City Comics, Amazon’s new comics imprint, announced an adaptation of Wool, adapted by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with art credited to Jimmy Broxton. It came out first in single issues, the fifth reaching Comixology on July 29, 2014 with one still to come, and was collected as Wool: The Graphic Novel in August 2014. Howey’s own announcement teased that readers who thought they knew the ending might be surprised.

Howey went back to the silo himself in three short stories, “In the Air” (2014), “In the Mountains” (2014) and “In the Woods” (2015), written for the Apocalypse Triptych anthologies he co-edited with John Joseph Adams. They were collected in Machine Learning (2017) and again, as Silo Stories, in the 2020 Silo Series Boxed Set.

Television came next. In July 2018 Variety reported that AMC was developing a Wool series. LaToya Morgan, who had an overall deal at AMC and had written for Turn and Into the Badlands, would write the pilot and executive produce, with Howey attached as a producer. Howey later wrote that his final choice had come down to three companies whose names began with A, and he chose AMC. AMC tried several times to make the show in-house, he wrote in August 2026, but the scripts never came right or the cost was too high. So it partnered with Apple, giving up control and credit.

On May 20, 2021 Apple TV+ ordered ten episodes from AMC Studios, which Variety called the second attempt at a Wool series. Graham Yost replaced Morgan as writer, executive producer and showrunner. Morten Tyldum would direct and executive produce, Rebecca Ferguson would play Juliette and executive produce, and Howey was among the executive producers. By his account Howey had already sat in the first season’s writers’ room in Los Angeles, before the pandemic. The show was announced as Wool and reached the screen as Silo; of the old title, Yost said, “it’s hard to say and it’s hard to hear.”

Filming began in late August 2021 at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire. The British stages were booked, so the production turned refrigeration warehouses into studios, and in one, about an hour outside London, the crew built production designer Gavin Bocquet’s stair. It is three levels of stairs, not even a full circle, standing in for every floor of the silo, with its surroundings redressed or extended with blue screen. “It was incredibly arduous to build,” Yost said. Howey describes what walking onto it was like:

“Are you guys trying to prepare for the end times? Why are you building this?”

Bocquet, by his interviewer’s summary, kept away from the books and the graphic novel and worked from the scripts. His silo of metal, wood and concrete, Art Deco and mid-century modern, won him and set decorator Amanda Bernstein a BAFTA TV Craft award in 2024.

Season 1 premiered on May 5, 2023 with two episodes and ran weekly to June 30: ten episodes which, in Yost’s words, are “just the first half of ‘Wool.’” Like the book, it kills off its first leads early. Then it builds a long detective story around Juliette as sheriff, and it holds back the book’s first great reveal, the lie in the cleaner’s visor, until the finale. The cafeteria’s view of the dead world was virtual production: LED screens carried the image so that its grey light fell on the actors. Apple renewed the show in June 2023, before the season ended. Critics singled out its production design (88% on Rotten Tomatoes, 75 on Metacritic).

Season 2 was written before season 1 finished filming and shot from June 2023 to March 2024, stopped from July to December by the SAG-AFTRA strike. It aired from November 15, 2024 to January 17, 2025. It covers the rest of Wool and, as Yost had warned, ends a little differently. Juliette shares the dead Silo 17 with Solo, renamed Jimmy Conroy and played by Steve Zahn, while Mechanical rises against Bernard in Silo 18, and a closing coda in a near-present Washington introduces Congressman Daniel Keene and Helen Drew. Silo 17 was the Silo 18 set redressed by a new production designer, Nicole Northridge, and its flooded levels were a tank built in the studio. On December 16, 2024, halfway through the season, Apple renewed Silo for a third season and a fourth, final one.

Season 3 aired from July 3 to September 4, 2026, one episode each Friday, on a service that had dropped the “+” to become Apple TV. Yost maps it to Shift, though not to Shift’s dates. Its “Before Times” thread follows Daniel Keene, who is Shift’s Donald (“we just didn’t want anyone named Donald in that role,” Yost said), and Helen Drew through a Washington that is, by Yost’s account, “basically contemporaneous with us”, not 2049. In the silo’s present Juliette comes back from outside with no memory, which is the show’s invention. It was the best-reviewed season yet on Rotten Tomatoes (96%), and Howey reported Wool climbing Amazon’s charts again, fifteen years on.

On September 4, 2026, the day of the season 3 finale, Apple announced that Silo will return for its fourth and final season on July 9, 2027. It was filmed from August 2025 to March 2026, almost back to back with season 3, and Yost says it adapts Dust. The teaser released with the date shows Billings telling the other silos that one silo controls the rest, and Juliette meeting Daniel in a tunnel and demanding to know who he is. Of season 4, Yost told TheWrap: “Well, it is going to be war.”

If the date holds, the final season will begin sixteen years to the month after the first story went up on Kindle. Of all these attempts, only Apple’s is set to tell the whole story, four seasons for three books, with Howey an executive producer on every one.