Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) characters

Appears from the start

The silo's sheriff, a careful and widely liked man who has been a widower for three years. His wife Allison was sent outside to clean and died on the hillside within sight of the silo's cameras, and he has kept her questions as well as her office ever since. He knows the silo's laws better than anyone, including the single unforgivable one: saying aloud that you wish to go outside. He has decided to break it on purpose.

First appears in chapter 5

Holston's wife, a technician skilled with the silo's computers and employed to recover data lost from its servers. Warm, stubborn and endlessly curious, she wants a child and spends her spare hours picking through old records. The gaps she finds there, and the files somebody took trouble to delete, convince her that the story the silo tells about its own past is not true.

First appears in chapter 4

The silo's mayor for decades, an elderly woman who won the office young and has held it by being trusted rather than feared. She treats the silo's people as an extended family, worries about the falling birth rate and the restless lower levels, and has never made peace with the cleanings she is obliged to preside over. Her long working partnership with her deputy is the closest thing either of them has to a marriage.

First appears in chapter 4

The silo's senior deputy, a lean, gruff man near the end of a long career, who has served under more than one sheriff and has been quietly in love with Mayor Jahns for most of his life without ever saying so. He is loyal, unpolished, and openly suspicious of the departments at the top of the silo.

First appears in chapter 4

The head of IT, a short, precise man with round glasses who runs the silo's most powerful department. IT owns the servers, the computers, the outside sensors and the manufacture of the suits used for cleanings, and Bernard is accustomed to mayors deferring to him. He is polite, quick, and unmistakably the person in any room who knows the most.

First appears in chapter 4

The IT lab technician who prepares a condemned person for the walk outside: fitting the suit, running the checklist, and explaining what is expected of them with the wool pads and the sensor lenses. He treats the ritual as a procedure with steps, which is what makes it possible for him to perform it.

First appears in chapter 8

A machinist from Mechanical at the very bottom of the silo, who has spent her adult life keeping the main generator and the pumps alive. Practical, blunt and famously stubborn, she thinks in terms of broken parts and root causes and has no patience for the politics of the upper levels. She has not been up to the top in years and is estranged from her father, who lives in the mid levels. The dead sheriff named her as his replacement, and the mayor comes down the entire length of the silo to offer her the badge.

First appears in chapter 12

Juliette's father, a doctor who delivers babies in one of the silo's mid-level nurseries. Quiet and dutiful, he has been estranged from his daughter since she left for Mechanical as a girl, and the two have barely spoken since.

First appears in chapter 12

A young shadow in the sheriff's office and the candidate IT would prefer to see wearing the badge. Agreeable, careful of his prospects, and comfortably aligned with the department that backs him.

First appears in chapter 16

An elderly electrician in Mechanical who repairs the silo's small electronics and has not left his workshop, or the down-deep, in decades. His own people consider him eccentric, but there is nothing electrical in the silo he cannot take apart and put back together, and he was the nearest thing Juliette had to a teacher.

First appears in chapter 16

The head of Mechanical, a large, heavily bearded man who runs the down-deep's workforce and answers to the upper levels only when he must. He is fiercely protective of his people, contemptuous of decisions taken by officials who have never stood beside the generator, and slow enough to anger that his anger carries weight.

First appears in chapter 22

A young IT technician who spends his off hours alone in the darkened top-floor cafeteria with a chart and a pencil, mapping the handful of stars the outside sensors can pick out at night. Shy, methodical and more curious than ambitious, he is one of very few people at the top of the silo who treats the new sheriff as something other than an intruder.

First appears in chapter 24

A young technician Juliette trained as a shadow in Mechanical before he was promoted up to IT. Bright, eager and still loyal to the people who raised him, he thinks of himself as one of hers rather than one of theirs.

First appears in chapter 32

A mechanic on the generator crew in the down-deep and one of Juliette's closest friends there. Level-headed and quick to act, she is one of the people Mechanical turns to when the department has to organize itself.

First appears in chapter 38

The head of Supply, a small, sharp-tongued older woman who runs the department that manufactures nearly everything the silo uses. Supply's relationship with IT is a rivalry as much as a partnership, and she is one of the few people in the silo willing to act against IT's interests.

Also known as Jimmy Parker

First appears in chapter 60

The only living resident of Silo 17, a bearded man who has spent more than thirty years alone behind the steel door of that silo's server room. He was a boy when his silo collapsed and was sealed inside for his own safety; he has kept himself going since on stored food and scavenged water, talking mostly to himself. He is skittish around another person, protective of his territory, and knows the dead silo better than anyone alive.