Maybe prequel is too grand for this book. I know right? is this review going to get worse bro? Shift is more like the back story an author prepares for his main book, and then goes back and fleshes it out to make into a book. I'm tempted to say, Silmarillion, I'm looking at you, but that's not right. Silmarillion is a series of stories and lore from the first age of middle earth, and while they help to inform the later stories, they also stand on their own. I'm not sure if Shift came out first, if anyone would have been interested enough to read Wool.
Maybe I'm coming down too hard. There were some interesting parts to Shift, but I'm not sure I needed as much text to tell me what I learned, and I'm also wondering how much more text it would have taken to tell me everything I wanted to know. Here's my less hard critique: Story is pretty good, but it needs some tightening. This book is a lot like me; it just needs to lose 10% of its body weight and it will be fine. The story is pretty grim, and unlike some other stories involving supervillains, Shift gives us a group of villains, who have some twisted views on how to make the world a better place (yep, been there, seen that) and enough power to institute their evil plans (okay, seen that too) but apparently not enough smarts and/or foresight to understand either the short-term, mid-term or long-term drawbacks in their ridiculous plan.
Its as if they all got together and talked about this big, crazy idea, and all the while everyone assumed that it was just them that not only thought this idea was crazy, but that everyone else must be smarter than them and knew better than they did. "Go along to get along" may be a useful tactic in some situations, but a worldwide mass extinction pact is not one of those situations.
