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...