Hugin & Munin Journal

A swarm without a face is hard to fight. It has no throne room, final duel or villainous speech before the last battle. It moves through bodies, signals, appetite, reproduction or shared thought. Killing one creature may change almost nothing because the thing making decisions—or simply continuing—exists elsewhere. Stories often solve this difficulty by giving the swarm a queen. Sometimes she is literal: the egg-laying Alien Queen at the centre of a nest. Sometimes she is a central intelligence such as the Borg Queen, an Overmind, a brain bug or a master signal. Whatever her form, she performs similar narrative work. The swarm receives a face, a voice, a woundable body and somewhere for intention and blame to gather. This is dramatically useful. It is also a retreat from what makes the collective strange. A genuinely distributed enemy may have no king to kill, no tyrant to overthrow and no single mind whose defeat repairs the world. The queen makes the swarm resemble a monarchy...

Most fantasy and science fiction assume that a person is bounded. A body contains a self; a mind has an inside. Magic, possession, telepathy and technology may complicate the border, but stories usually return to the same moral architecture: someone chooses, someone suffers, someone remembers, someone is guilty and someone can refuse. The hive mind attacks that architecture. It presents bodies whose individuality is unclear, absent or organised in a form that ordinary moral language struggles to describe. Is each body a person, or is the collective the person? Can one member be innocent while the whole is guilty? Can there be love without privacy, dissent without separation or courage without an individual will standing apart from the group? This is why hive minds recur so persistently in fantasy and science fiction. They threaten more than the hero’s body. They challenge the assumption that the individual is the natural unit of meaning. A dragon can be slain and a tyrant overthr...

Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat , the seventh Dresden Files novel, is where Harry’s wisecracks stop making the series feel light. He still jokes while frightened, injured and outnumbered, but the humour no longer feels like a routine performance attached to the narrator. It is how Harry refuses to let fear set the terms. The book also sends Harry in two directions at once. His standing among the White Council’s Wardens begins to improve while his private willingness to exploit forbidden power becomes harder to dismiss as an emergency exception. Luccio and the surviving Wardens see a difficult wizard becoming more useful, and perhaps more trustworthy. The reader sees how much of the story must remain outside their account. When I began this broader Dresden Files reread , I wondered whether memory had exaggerated the gap between the early books and the part of the series I remembered as its peak. Spectacular endings can preserve a book’s reputation after the machinery supporting them has fad...

Fantasy has many ways to tell us that an army is dangerous. It can give the soldiers black banners, iron discipline, strange weapons or a reputation for leaving burned cities behind them. One of the most unsettling choices is simpler: remove the human face and replace it with something that looks less like a mask than a new anatomy. A line of soldiers advances in segmented armour. Their helmets flare into mandibles, their visors suggest compound eyes and their plates overlap like shell or chitin. The bodies underneath may be human, but the surface says that the people inside have already been processed into units. Armour no longer protects the soldier. It appears to have absorbed them. This is why insectoid armour belongs so naturally to fantasy empires. It turns hierarchy, obedience and replaceability into a visible body. Yet the image is politically unstable. It can expose the machinery through which an empire erases individuality, or it can perform the same erasure on behalf of ...

Prime Video’s Spider-Noir places Nicolas Cage’s ageing superhero in 1930s New York, before scanners, artificial intelligence and near-magical machinery became the ordinary furniture of superhero fiction. The period setting supplies trench coats, elevated trains and hard shadows, but its more important contribution is conceptual: it returns the superhero to a world in which extraordinary abilities have not yet become difficult to distinguish from advanced equipment. The series is part detective story, part pulp adventure and a welcome change in texture. It does not escape spectacle, familiar villains or the structural habits of modern superhero television. Its eight-episode season also sags in the middle and could have been shortened without losing anything essential. Even so, the historical limitations give the drama room to breathe and make the Spider feel less like one component in an enormous technological system than an impossible presence in an otherwise recognisable city. ...

In fantasy, a raven is rarely allowed to be only a bird. It may arrive as a messenger, spy, familiar, omen or royal emblem. It perches on ruined towers, circles battlefields, whispers to gods and carries letters that alter the fate of kingdoms. Even when it does nothing more than watch from a branch, the story quietly asks us to assume that its presence means something. The raven survives as a symbol because it is unusually efficient. It gathers thought, memory, death, prophecy, kingship, surveillance, communication and war into one recognisable shape. It can belong to a god, a witch, a corpse, a king, a prison tower or a messenger network. Few animals move so easily between wisdom and rot. That range was not invented by fantasy writers reaching mechanically for a black bird. Ravens were intelligent scavengers, battlefield presences, vocal imitators and uneasy neighbours of human settlement long before the genre turned them into symbols. Myth amplified qualities people believed t...

Modern medicine can remove a patient’s T cells, engineer them in a laboratory and return them with receptors designed to recognise cancer . It can transplant healthy blood-forming stem cells and reprogramme mature cells into an embryonic-like pluripotent state. Yet it often struggles to predict how any one intervention will behave inside the changing ecology of an individual body. That gap between intervention and understanding is the most compelling subject of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Song of the Cell . The book follows the history of cell biology from the first microscopes and early theories of disease to immunotherapy, reproductive medicine and regenerative treatments. Its deeper concern is the unstable distance between seeing a biological phenomenon, explaining it and learning to control it. Medicine has repeatedly acquired the power to alter cellular behaviour before it fully understood what that behaviour meant within the larger organism. Sometimes that asymmetry saves live...