7.4 /10 1 Votes
Cover artist David K. Stone Publication date 1973 Originally published 1973 Genre Science Fiction Country United States of America | 3.7/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 278 pp Publisher Doubleday | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback) Similar Frank Herbert books, Science Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hellstrom's Hive is a 1973 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. It is about a secret group of humans who model their lives upon social insects, and the unsettling events that unfold after they are discovered by a deeply undercover agency of the US government.
Contents
Inspiration
David L. Wolper's quasi-documentary film The Hellstrom Chronicle, released in 1971, was the inspiration for Herbert's novel. In an interview with Tim O'Reilly, Herbert stated: "I said, 'In terms of what we want now, as we think of our world now, what would be the most horrible kind of civilization you could imagine?' And then I said, 'Now I will make... [the members of that civilization] the heroes of the story, by taking negative elements of the surrounding society and treating them as the villain.' That creates a very peculiar kind of tension."
Reception
David Pringle gave Hellstrom's Hive three stars out of four and called it "a powerful novel".
Awards
In 1978 Hellstrom's Hive won the Prix Tour-Apollo Award for best science fiction novel published in French.