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    Hellstrom's Hive
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    Hellstrom's Hive
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    Hellstrom's Hive
    Ebook447 pages6 hours

    Hellstrom's Hive

    By Frank Herbert

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    America is a police state, and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.

    When the Agency discovered that Dr. Hellstrom's Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its weaknesses—it could not be allowed to continue. What they discovered was a nightmare more horrific and hideous than even their paranoid government minds could devise.

    First published in Galaxy magazine in 1973 as "Project 40," Frank Herbert's vivid imagination and brilliant view of nature and ecology have never been more evident than in this classic of science fiction.


    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 24, 2010
    ISBN9781429969031
    Author

    Frank Herbert

    Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies. As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know." His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

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    Reviews for Hellstrom's Hive

    3.5/5

    149 ratings8 reviews

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    • 1/5
      A science fiction political thriller. Suffers from awkwardness and a trouble building sympathy for any of the characters.
    • 2/5
      Unconvincing when I read it 30 years ago, unimproved upon a recent second reading.
    • 2/5
      This was an interesting story about a perfect society, but one based on insects. Compelling storytelling made it move along quickly, with intrigue from government agency's involvement in the story, but it wasn't great, just good.
    • 3/5
      There's a nice (and particularly horrifying) science fiction concept behind it. But everything else about the book - the plot, the characters, even most of the prose - is straight out of a B movie. It is actually based on a movie, which is now out of print, so I can't tell what's being faithful to a bad source and what's just bad, but I guess it doesn't matter much. Still, it's certainly a unique and memorable book.
    • 3/5
      Well... it's definitely a novel from the 70s. The first quarter of the novel has a lot of characters to keep track of which takes a bit more concentration than some novels might. In fact, a lot of the characters aren't fleshed out anyway so I'm not sure why they're even in there - for the most part they all seem to be interchangeable. The story itself is almost good... Part of the problem with the story is that we aren't led to care about any of the characters - they are all rather plastic. Female characters are all cardboard cutouts and exactly what you'd expect from 1970s science fiction (but, to be fair, the males are also cardboard cutouts). So unless you're on a hunt to fill out a reading collection (Herbert, 70s sci-fi, etc) I wouldn't waste time with this.
    • 2/5
      Not Herbert's greatest work and a bit dated by modern advances in biology. Nevertheless, this is still an interesting study in alternative human anthropology.
    • 4/5
      Not the world's greatest book, but an interesting premise. And while the ending was slightly underwhelming, I really enjoyed the fact that the way he wrote it, even though you'd think there ought to be a pretty clear "good guys" and "bad guys" divide here, you're left a bit conflicted on who you'd actually want to come out on top. Or maybe the answer is neither? In any case, while it certainly is no Dune, his aim is still clearly on bringing some attention to ecology and how humans interact with the planet and everything on it, and I think he did that fairly well. Recommended to those who are Herbert fans, and those who are curious and have open minds.
    • 3/5
      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 is unique among the sci-fi that I 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 entomological 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.