I am an enormous fan of Silo, having first run into it as a comic (I missed the books, sorry!) and now as a TV series currently screening its second season on Apple. And while I love Rebecca Ferguson and I love Tim Robbins and I love everything the show is trying to say about class and power and the human spirit, I'll admit I am mostly watching it for the silo itself.
It's a breathtaking exercise in world-building. I want to visit. I want to touch it. I want to live there, in a way I have rarely felt about a fictional space before. Please note I'm not saying I want to live in Silo's fundamentalist autocracy, trapped in a class system that's so entrenched it's physically represented in the design of the structure itself. Nor am I advocating for some kind of future apocalypse that forces our entire species to live underground for centuries at a time, with the air above so toxic it causes almost instantaneous death. I just think the silo itself is cool, and I want to spend some time in it experiencing how it all works.
Let me tell you something about me that might help you see where I'm coming from here. I'm a freak for a fully-realised fictional space. The Hero's Journey is fine, romantic subplots and epic tales have their place, but if your game/show/comic/book manages to depict what it's like for the average person to live, work and die in its make-believe world, I am IN.
I'm often into fiction as an escape, so the more comprehensive the escape, the better. Do you know what my favourite scene in Battlestar Galactica is? When they auction off the last tube of toothpaste in the universe. Game of Thrones? Any time someone is arguing about the budget. Andor? Seeing the bureaucracy in action.
A fictional world imagined in full is a magical place, allowing me to not just escape the real world and pay it a visit as long as a game or episode lasts, but for it to burrow its way into the depths of my imagination. I've found myself walking to work thinking about the relationship between Gas Town, the Bullet Farm and the Citadel. I've sat on the tram thinking about the daily commute for the civilians trapped inside the SDF-1. I've even been at a doctor's office thinking about all the hilarious and terrifying ways you can die in Raised By Wolves, and that once you were dead, what that would mean for whichever weirdo faction you'd been a part of.
I think about Silo a lot. As a fictional setting it is--despite, or perhaps because of its intimate focus--a complete world, one with history, politics, a social structure and conflicts between them. The 10,000 people trapped in that place are living full human lives, they're believing in stuff and all (mostly) working towards something. In every shot of Apple's excellent series you can single out any passerby in the background and wonder what their role is, which floor they live on, what that would mean for their family life, what their dreams for the future would be.
Which means I can imagine myself in there too. I can picture myself getting up in the morning in my surprisingly architectural apartment, showering, getting dressed and making myself a meal in the fully-functional kitchen everybody in the show seems to have. Maybe while turning for the door I'd brush my shoulders against the thick concrete walls, which have lasted many lifetimes and will last many more. I might kiss my wife goodbye, and any kids I was lucky enough to be allowed to have by the government, then head off to sit at a desk all day, crunching numbers and data on a whirring old green-screened computer, doing my part to keep the silo running and everyone, if not happy, then at least in line.
Or maybe I wouldn't! Maybe I'd be toiling away down in mechanical, looked down upon by everyone above me, yet also acutely aware that because I control the lights and air I hold the fate of the entire silo in my hands. I could be in recycling, the wizards of my age, the lucky few standing between the remnants of an advanced society and, if enough toasters and monitors were to break, the stone age.
Regardless of my job, I can feel the weight of each room's steel doors as they swing open, clearly designed to last centuries, and feel the CLUNK of their industrial-strength latches as they close. I can taste the food, as fresh as it could be given the circumstances, and I wonder if I'd ever get sick of the same meals over and over, or if that wouldn't bother me since I'd never known any other life. I can hear the clack of every beige keyboard, the hum of the screens, the whirring of the ventilation system keeping everyone alive since the air above is almost instantly poisonous.
Climbing up and down the stairs all day just to get anywhere would annoy me, the me living on this Earth in 2024, but the imagined me inhabiting the silo would probably benefit from all the exercise. And besides, there'd be no point complaining about it anyway, it's not like there's an elevator; these classes of workers need to be kept as physically separate as possible, the place was designed like that on purpose (as we're particularly finding out in the last few episodes!).
What would I, someone who had never known the outside, think about the outside? Probably whatever I was told! I've never felt the sun, never known the wind, never smelled freshly-cut grass or heard the roar of the ocean. All I've ever known is the concrete walls of the silo, so if something happened that challenged my established view of what was outside its walls, maybe I simply wouldn't believe it. Or maybe it would light a fire inside my imagination, and others, and there'd be revolution.
If the time came for that revolution, would I join in? I don't know, man! It's easy as someone watching this on TV to cheer for those wanting to get outside, or to at least affect change inside a silo, but if the silo had been all anyone had known for centuries, would I risk it all? I don't know!
It's not often I find myself daydreaming about what the entirety of a life must be like inside a fictional universe as much as Silo's, but then there are few fictional universes that have mapped out their structure and design so comprehensively. The silo was built to last, and it has lasted, and every shot and scene of this fantastic TV show revels in a place where 10,000 people live now, but where so many others have lived and died before them as well.
It's so thorough that it doesn't even feel like a set, so much as something that's been filmed on location. The silo looks like a place I can actually visit and walk through, learn about and explore. A historical attraction from a different timeline. A place I can touch and smell and wander its halls. Like I've said already, I don't want to live there forever, but it seems real enough that I'd at least like to visit.
Silo might be a show about some of the last survivors on Earth, trapped forever inside a concrete bunker that sucks, but as a microcosm of a fully-realised human society--structurally and architecturally, all in the one place--it's a masterpiece.
UPDATE: Oh, looks like Adam Savage did a special on the Silo's construction (for the show, not in-universe) recently, and it shows just how much attention to detail and thought and love went into it! (thanks HogansGhosts!)
