Hellstrom's Hive, Frank Herbert
4.0 Stars
5-8-2025

Very unpleasant, but the ideas were interesting (for the time) and noticeably influenced a lot of later sci-fi works (e.g. Alpha Centauri). So like a lot of Herbert's books really. The main strength of the book is also its main conceit, the horrifying human hive that Hellstrom runs. It takes a while, but the eventual tour of the hive is effectively and memorably creepy? terrifying? unsettling? offensive? in a way that many other authors are never really able to achieve. Everything else around the hive itself is so-so; the scenario is set in the present-day of the 70's, but it also chooses to give the Hivers like 6 different types of hyper-technology. It ends up being a weird choice, like if you had a story with Gypsies, but then you also gave the Gypsies nanites and psychic powers and time travel. Not exactly fair, and raises the question of whether it would have been better to tell the story in a sci-fi universe rather than in the modern day. Speaking of the modern day, it is so weird to go back to a time before ubiquitous cellphones, surveillance, etc. The 3 letter agencies really had to work for it back then.