I just finished the books and now I'm catching up on season 2 of the show, but I've got a question for the other book readers.

Did I miss something or were a couple of plot threads just left hanging:

1) The "nanos" felt messy to me. I know we needed a futuristic existential threat, but that felt unnecessarily complicated. Juliette being able to heal thanks to the good nanos in Silo 17 just felt pointless, the people in Silo 1 basically being immortal but all going to die anyway?

2) The servers ranking the silos. Did I miss something there? It felt like they were continuously hinting at some sort of big reveal about that data but it never came.

Overall these were good enough books, kept me entertained, but some of the plot details just felt a little loose to me which kept this from being up there with the elite sci-fi series I've read.

bobinator said:

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I just finished the books and now I'm catching up on season 2 of the show, but I've got a question for the other book readers.

Did I miss something or were a couple of plot threads just left hanging:

1) The "nanos" felt messy to me. I know we needed a futuristic existential threat, but that felt unnecessarily complicated. Juliette being able to heal thanks to the good nanos in Silo 17 just felt pointless, the people in Silo 1 basically being immortal but all going to die anyway?

2) The servers ranking the silos. Did I miss something there? It felt like they were continuously hinting at some sort of big reveal about that data but it never came.

Overall these were good enough books, kept me entertained, but some of the plot details just felt a little loose to me which kept this from being up there with the elite sci-fi series I've read.

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Regarding #2, iirc whichever one was at the top of the rankings whenever the world was deemed "safe" was going to be the one silo that was released to repopulate the world.

Yeah that was definitely the case but the writing made it seem like something about how it was compiling/storing/whatever the data had some kind of reveal, but maybe that was just it

Yeah, that was it. Only one silo got to live. All the others (including #1) would be terminated. And it seemed the ranking system was so what arbitrary and mysterious.

That's what I was referring to, it seemed like they were hinting at some sort of big reveal about how the rankings were being tabulated. I was expecting some kind of huge reveal that actually an AI had been in charge the entire time or something.

These books ended up being a whole lot of meh (imo). I watched season 1 and liked the premise, so read through the series. It took me like 9 months to get through because it didn't hook me like I was expecting and I kept reading other books instead.

The ending was terrible and I didn't get any real payoff from it. Disappointing. I'm also willing to suspend belief when the writing and plot are top notch, but I found this far from that.

I think the point is just that once they were in those silos, none of them were really in control of their fate. They thought they were, but it was all basically just an experiment and only Juliette and Donald really tried to throw off the shackles and get free.

Bringing this back up because do we think they're fully ditching the nano stuff for good ol' fashioned nuclear in the show?