Hellstrom's Hive

Introduction by Adam Roberts

In 1971 a feature-length movie called The Hellstrom Chronicle won the Oscar for Best Documentary (released in the UK the following year, it picked up the 1972 BAFTA for the same category). Directed by Walon Green and written by David Seltzer, it cast actor Lawrence Pressman in the role of Dr Nils Hellstrom, a fictional Swedish Professor. Over the course of the film Hellstrom presents a variety of fascinating documentary footage of insects, spicing its natural history with a quasi-apocalyptic commentary. His thesis is that insects have inhabited this world a lot longer than humanity, are better adapted to it, and will prevail where we will not. I recommend you check it out: the whole film, in sections, is on YouTube.

Hive, is a fictional elaboration of the premise of that movie. As such it is a fairly unusual piece of writing. We’re familiar, of course, with ‘novelisations’ of motion pictures, commonplace and usually low-quality cash-in exercises. On occasion writers pen sequels or prequels to successful films, sometimes to more interesting effect. But Hellstrom’s Hive is something different: an original novel of considerable power that takes the premise (and, of course, name) from a film in order to go in a radically new creative direction. The book is not a tie-in; it’s a kind of tie-out: a deliberate metamorphosis of one text into something much richer and stranger. In place of the effective but rather simple-minded documentary narrative of the film, Herbert creates a compelling apocalyptic thriller. Where The Hellstrom Chronicle is interested in insects, Herbert shifts the focus to people.

Herbert’s name is most closely associated with Dune (1965), his hugely influential planetary romance. It and its myriad sequels (not all of them written by Herbert, not many of them very good) established the desert-planet of Arrakis as one of the most celebrated locations in twentieth-century science fiction. Indeed, so overwhelmed has Herbert’s writing career been by this, his single most successful creation, that it is easy to forget that he wrote other books. He did, of course; a great many, including a number of titles at least as memorable and brilliant as Dune. More to the point, and despite its enormous success, Dune isn’t even particularly characteristic of its author.

Dune’s wide-open, barren spaces work as both topographic realisation and also as metaphor: specific enough (it has to do in some sense with ‘Arabia’ and Islam, with climate change and also mysticism) not to be vague, but empty enough to provide an imaginative space that readers can fill with their own phantasmic creativity. It seems to me that the international success of the Dune books has something to do with a kind of imaginative spaciousness, a open-ended aesthetic particularly hospitable to fan engagement. But this is not what we find if we turn to the rest of Herbert’s work. On the contrary, his predominant aesthetic is one of claustrophobia. His first novel was the futuristic submarine thriller The Dragon in the Sea (1956), that creates genuine tension by increasing the pressure on its confined, increasingly paranoid crew. The Dosadi Experiment (1977) concerns a city in which 850 million individuals are confined within 40 square kilometres. And Herbert returned several times to notions of human life modelled on the close-packed hive-existence of insects: in The Green Brain (1966) and then again in Hellstrom’s Hive (1973). Of all these fictional representations of claustrophobia, Hellstrom’s Hive is the best. Herbert understands that the metaphorical diamond inside our skulls is created by pressure; that claustrophobia and closeness create unparalleled narrative focus. Where Dune opens itself into myriad new possibilities—think how often that novel has been adapted into other media, cinema, TV, music, video game, fan art and so on—Hellstrom’s Hive works in the opposite direction, taking a cinematic text and closing it, brilliantly, down into prose narrative.

Science fiction has long been fascinated with the ‘hive mind’. This has, I suppose, something to do with the uncanny balance in insect existence between estranging alienness and weird familiarity. On the one hand, ant-nests, beehives and termite mounds are utterly unlike human mammalian interaction, such that ‘insectoid’ has become such a ubiquitous way of representing alien life that it has become almost a cliché. At the same time, though, human social structures are so complex and interlocking that, in nature, only the insect hive provides any kind of analogue; and the division of labour, the collectivised existence and the singleness of purpose are as compelling (in their efficiency and unity) as they are repellent. H.G. Wells’ 1905 short story ‘The Empire of the Ants’ posited the dangerous potential of the hive-mind; and in his earlier novel The First Men in the Moon (1901) the lunar aliens live according to the logic of a great hive. Hundreds of stories, novels and films followed, either casting hive-insects as global threats—as in Frank Ridley’s The Green Machine (1926), Gordon Douglas’ giant ants film Them! (1954) or Keith Roberts’ The Furies (1966)—or else conceived of aliens as menacing insectoid threats. Amongst the many examples of this latter strategy are Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), Orson Scott Card’s Enders’ Game (1985) and its many sequels, or the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek: the Next Generation. In all these cases, what is acknowledged is the strength (understood as threat) of the hive organisation when seen from the outside. When viewed, as it were, from the inside that strength becomes the correlative to social oppression, often during the Cold War equated directly with Western perceptions of Communist threat.

Herbert’s novel, though written when the anti-Red paranoia was high in his home country, has aged better, because he takes a longer, evolutionary perspective. In this—like the recent novel Coalescent (2003) by Stephen Baxter—the hive itself is much more carefully balanced, simultaneously appealing and appalling. We can read the logic of its swarm as that of stifling claustrophobia or of protective intimacy and safety, something Herbert’s treatment, with its various comely nude women and talk of mating, isn’t above treating in terms of sexual titillation. In other words, we can take the hive as a trope for the alien nation or as a trope for the family. And one of the things that lifts Herbert’s hive above the run-of-the-mill is its openness to the idea that hive-life entails not hideously regimented monotony but—precisely—metamorphosis. As Hellstrom himself says, echoing the motion picture that (once again) Herbert has metamorphosed into this novel, ‘unlike man, whose physical limitations are dictated from the moment of his birth, the insect is born with the ability to actually improve upon his body. When the insect reaches the limits of his capability, he miraculously transforms into an entirely new being. In this metamorphosis, I find the most basic pattern for my understanding of the Hive. To me, the Hive is a cocoon from which the new human will emerge.’ The metamorphosis from film to book formally enacts this larger ambition. Things, says this novel, are going to change.

Adam Roberts