Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive reviewed by jseger9000
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1jseger9000
Okay, I finished the book last night around midnight and knocked this out over the next hour (which made today at work suck). I wanted to put together a review while the thoughts were still fresh. I wanted to review a Frank Herbert book without mentioning Dune. I think he deserves to be remembered for more than that. In the end, I couldn't quite do it, but I tried.
The review is long-ish. Is it too long? As mentioned, I was groggy as I wrote it, so please feel free to slice, dice and eviscerate anything that needs it.
Any and all criticism is appreciated.
---
There's a secret under Oregon. A group of people have decided to model a society on insects. They have secretly built a hive beneath a farm in Oregon. It is now fifty-thousand strong. A shadowy government organization has taken an interest in this odd farm. Will they discover the horrors of Hellstrom's hive?
Hellstrom's Hive takes a different and quirky idea and runs with it. Inspired by the '70's quasi-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, Frank Herbert decided to write a book examining the concept of humans adapted to a hive-like society.
The book starts out strong, with the eerie atmosphere of a horror novel. The first bunch of pages fly by as we follow an intrepid investigator who is keeping an eye on the farm. There's no real activity to speak of, but the situation is unsettling nonetheless.
Unfortunately, after that strong opening, the book settles down into a much more stable pace. There are no chapters in the book. Rather there are continuous sections, each representing one of the several viewpoints we follow through the course of the story. It is all interesting and there's always something happening. But the sense of urgency and tension the book starts with aren't present, making the rest of the book seem almost sedate in comparison.
Still, Hellstrom's Hive isn't meant to be a potboiler. Frank Herbert's science fiction is unique among the sci-fi that I have read in that he focuses on ecology and society rather than the technology and futurism that is the focus of most of the science fiction I prefer.
Here, Herbert does a very good job of explaining in detail how his imagined society would work. His characters are pretty flat (though still better and more lifelike than the characters in most contemporaneous sci-fi), but his hive-society is richly imagined and detailed. It would have been easy to make the hive-society a stand-in for communism, even inadvertently. But Herbert never even comes close. While several aspects of the hive society are horrific to us, he never paints them as villains. The 'heroic' side is shown to be much more evil as an organization, though they aren't presented as the bad guys either.
Several different agents from the never-named government agency are followed, along with Nils Hellstrom, the current leader of the hive, who passes himself off as a maker of etymological documentaries. The sections are also peppered with quotes from agency reports, a hive manual, the words of the former hive brood-mother and other sources that add color and depth to the story.
I'm not clear why the the government agency he created is so shadowy. I suppose he wanted to use their back-stabbing as a juxtaposition to his hive people, but he could have accomplished the same thing using a real agency. Why not the FBI? Maybe he just wanted his characters not to be bound by the rules and laws a real agency has to follow. But all of the mystery surrounding this agency seemed to act as a distraction and it never really goes anywhere.
I have a few complaints. The book is dated, the pacing is off and I feel like the book maybe didn't live up to its idea's potential. But what it set out to do is well done. If you've never read Frank Herbert, read Dune. But he deserves to be remembered for more than the series that over-shadowed him. If you enjoyed Dune and would like to see what else he's written, either Hellstrom's Hive or The White Plague are good places to look.
The review is long-ish. Is it too long? As mentioned, I was groggy as I wrote it, so please feel free to slice, dice and eviscerate anything that needs it.
Any and all criticism is appreciated.
---
There's a secret under Oregon. A group of people have decided to model a society on insects. They have secretly built a hive beneath a farm in Oregon. It is now fifty-thousand strong. A shadowy government organization has taken an interest in this odd farm. Will they discover the horrors of Hellstrom's hive?
Hellstrom's Hive takes a different and quirky idea and runs with it. Inspired by the '70's quasi-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, Frank Herbert decided to write a book examining the concept of humans adapted to a hive-like society.
The book starts out strong, with the eerie atmosphere of a horror novel. The first bunch of pages fly by as we follow an intrepid investigator who is keeping an eye on the farm. There's no real activity to speak of, but the situation is unsettling nonetheless.
Unfortunately, after that strong opening, the book settles down into a much more stable pace. There are no chapters in the book. Rather there are continuous sections, each representing one of the several viewpoints we follow through the course of the story. It is all interesting and there's always something happening. But the sense of urgency and tension the book starts with aren't present, making the rest of the book seem almost sedate in comparison.
Still, Hellstrom's Hive isn't meant to be a potboiler. Frank Herbert's science fiction is unique among the sci-fi that I have read in that he focuses on ecology and society rather than the technology and futurism that is the focus of most of the science fiction I prefer.
Here, Herbert does a very good job of explaining in detail how his imagined society would work. His characters are pretty flat (though still better and more lifelike than the characters in most contemporaneous sci-fi), but his hive-society is richly imagined and detailed. It would have been easy to make the hive-society a stand-in for communism, even inadvertently. But Herbert never even comes close. While several aspects of the hive society are horrific to us, he never paints them as villains. The 'heroic' side is shown to be much more evil as an organization, though they aren't presented as the bad guys either.
Several different agents from the never-named government agency are followed, along with Nils Hellstrom, the current leader of the hive, who passes himself off as a maker of etymological documentaries. The sections are also peppered with quotes from agency reports, a hive manual, the words of the former hive brood-mother and other sources that add color and depth to the story.
I'm not clear why the the government agency he created is so shadowy. I suppose he wanted to use their back-stabbing as a juxtaposition to his hive people, but he could have accomplished the same thing using a real agency. Why not the FBI? Maybe he just wanted his characters not to be bound by the rules and laws a real agency has to follow. But all of the mystery surrounding this agency seemed to act as a distraction and it never really goes anywhere.
I have a few complaints. The book is dated, the pacing is off and I feel like the book maybe didn't live up to its idea's potential. But what it set out to do is well done. If you've never read Frank Herbert, read Dune. But he deserves to be remembered for more than the series that over-shadowed him. If you enjoyed Dune and would like to see what else he's written, either Hellstrom's Hive or The White Plague are good places to look.
2jimroberts
Not quite 600 words: not too long for my taste, given that you are saying useful things about the book. I find it more satisfying than the other LT reviews of the work.
4jimroberts
#3
Damn, I should have spotted that! I think I just automatically read it as what would make sense.
Damn, I should have spotted that! I think I just automatically read it as what would make sense.
5readafew
I like the review. Just felt I'd point out a little fact about...
I'm not clear why the the government agency he created is so shadowy.
It could have something to do with J Edgar Hoover was still the director when he was writing this book. Maybe?
I'm not clear why the the government agency he created is so shadowy.
It could have something to do with J Edgar Hoover was still the director when he was writing this book. Maybe?
6jseger9000
#'s 3-4: Doh! I just finished reading the book and still picked the wrong word. I'll fix that.
#5 - That could be it I guess. He goes to great lengths to point out that the agency is not the CIA or the FBI (the FBI do show up in the book), but then never really clarifies beyond that. He would have been better off strongly hinting that it was the FBI and been done with it.
The way it was set up, I kept expecting a twist where we would find out that Hellstrom's people were in control of the agency or something. But that doesn't happen.
#5 - That could be it I guess. He goes to great lengths to point out that the agency is not the CIA or the FBI (the FBI do show up in the book), but then never really clarifies beyond that. He would have been better off strongly hinting that it was the FBI and been done with it.
The way it was set up, I kept expecting a twist where we would find out that Hellstrom's people were in control of the agency or something. But that doesn't happen.
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