Warning: this article contains spoilers for Silo Season 3 and Hugh Howey’s books.

I have written more than once about authors who understand that adapting a book does not mean illustrating it, almost page by page. Stephen King may be the most entertaining example because he can either love or absolutely hate the result; others simply accept that, once the rights are sold, a different work is born. Hugh Howey definitely belongs to the latter group. But with Silo approaching the final two episodes of its third season, his position has become even more interesting: he does not merely accept some of Graham Yost’s changes. He believes the series is actually fixing things that could have worked better in his own books.

And we are not talking about minor details.

The first two seasons still moved, despite many detours, essentially through the territory of Wool. Season 3 faced a much bigger problem. Shift, the second book in the trilogy, leaves Juliette Nichols behind for a substantial portion of the story to explore the origins of the silo project. In a novel, that works. In a television series led by Rebecca Ferguson — whose face is literally on the poster — it would be almost impossible.

So Silo began doing something the books do not do in quite the same way: telling Shift while already incorporating elements from Dust, alternating Juliette’s present-day story with Daniel Keene and Helen Drew in the so-called “Before Times.” Yost himself has explained that spending virtually an entire season without Ferguson simply was not an option.

That decision also created one of the season’s biggest inventions: Juliette’s amnesia. It does not happen this way in the books. Howey’s novels certainly deal with drugs, memory control and erasure as tools of the system, but they do not turn Juliette into a direct victim of that mechanism after her return. On television, the device keeps the heroine at the center of the story while allowing her to rediscover truths that the audience itself is only beginning to understand.

Another radical change lies in the past.

Donald Keene became Daniel Keene, played by Ashley Zukerman. The name change is actually the least important difference. In the novel, Donald is an architect and congressman directly involved in designing the silos, even if he does not initially understand their full purpose. In the series, Daniel enters the conspiracy much later: he did not design the silos and is being gradually drawn into the operation.

That changes something essential: his guilt.

And this is precisely the alteration Howey has now chosen to defend after criticism from readers. In his words, it is “an improvement over the books.” The creative team did not want Daniel to be a willing participant in such a large part of the project — and Howey has promised that the reasons will become clear in the final two episodes. According to him, the change is crucial to the character’s arc.

Helen has also changed considerably. Instead of being mainly part of Donald’s personal life, she becomes Helen Drew, a journalist and active protagonist in the investigation. Yost has effectively transformed the pair into the center of a political thriller, allowing the conspiracy to unfold in front of us instead of trying to reproduce the much more complicated structure of Shift exactly as it appears on the page.

And there is more.

Bernard should already be dead. In the books, his trajectory ends well before the point the television series has now reached; here, he survives and remains a possible — perhaps even decisive — piece in the confrontation with the system. The Algorithm has also acquired a presence and personality that do not correspond exactly to Howey’s original chain of command. Camille Sims, meanwhile, occupies a far larger dramatic space, while characters, functions and events from Shift have been merged, displaced or eliminated.

Howey himself had already pointed out that adapting the second book in full would have required whole additional seasons, as well as many more characters and locations.

Perhaps that is why Season 3 may irritate readers more than the previous ones — but it is also the most interesting season when it comes to discussing what adaptation actually means.

Silo is not changing the destination simply to surprise people who have read the books. It is trying to reach the same major points by different routes, changing who knows what, when they discover it and, above all, who carries moral responsibility for what happened.

Howey seems entirely comfortable with that. He has said, for example, that he wishes the series had preserved the almost sacred rarity of paper from the books, but he also believes that most of the changes made for television have improved the story.

And that may be the crucial difference between freedom and betrayal in an adaptation: changing something does not necessarily mean abandoning the original. Sometimes it simply means asking whether there is another way to arrive at the same place.

In Daniel Keene’s case, Hugh Howey says there is.

With only two episodes left, we are about to find out whether he is right.