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Here, in its entirety - "HALE-BOPP", a comic drawn back in 2017 for my patreon. Set in the far future, it tells of the Hale-Bopp Dyson tree, the hive men who reside within it, and some extraterrestrial vacuumorphs who attempt to take up residence alongside them.
This story, and more like it, will be coming to kickstarter as part of a sci-fi comic collection called "A Star Called The Sun"... so keep your eyes peeled for it...
The hive-men of HALE-BOPP first showed up in print form back in 2016, for the cover of @imagecomics 's Island Magazine. I'm still keen on this piece - a dyson tree's crew receiving trade goods from a Euhumanist vessel, with the euhumanist security trooper eyeing his hive-equivalent suspiciously.
But the look and feel of the hive-men and their living space-suits were codified in sketches the preceding year, while i was still dreaming of an epic tale of hive-men colonizing mars (to be drawn by Matt Sheean).
This drawing in particular, from 2015, ended up getting snuck into last year's book, REFUGIUM, along with the Hale-Bopp Dyson Tree - EASTER EGGS FOR EVERYONE
If you'd like to read "HALE-BOPP" in it's entirety, you can find it on my patreon or on webtoon... and if you like sci-fi explorations of life in the hive without it being another cartoonishly evil stock villain, ruled by a single HIVE QUEEN/BRAIN BUG/etc, and more like a living eusocial community, you might enjoy the story I've got serializing on webtoon next week...
DICKS OUT FOR ANTHROPOLOGY! Now up - the next chapter of "A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS HIVE PARASITE", wherein our artistic hive parasite performs for his martian hosts...
If you want to follow along uncensored, you can find updates for free over on my patreon, too! MORE NEXT WEEK
Beginning (free) serialization next week - a short story called "HALE-BOPP", about a dyson tree, some hive-men, and an interstellar vacuumorph...
are hive men sentient in the same fashion we are? Do they experience the full range of subjectivity the modern homo sapiens does or was some of that excluded from their creation? It feels like it would have to in order to make them function well in an eusocial context. I'd be curious if you could expand on that
This is a question i've left a bit ambiguous for myself, because there is a wide range of answers.
In one version of the hive mind, a mass of human brains could be linked to become components of one huge brain (like the components of our own brains), with the individual completely subsumed into the whole. This angle is one that I want to play with later, as a biotech answer to making supercomputers...
For our martians, and the crew of the Hale-Bopp dyson Tree, I imagine there would be some of this at play, since my presumed method of communication in the hive is some sort of radio-telepathy - low-fi neural network stuff. Individual hive-men might have some agency of their own, though, in how they reacted to specific stimuli.
But you're right in that their subjective experience would be a lot different then ours, in part because they'd always be sharing in the data from the rest of the hive. There'd be little individual internal life for a hive member, since they'd always be picking up feelings and thoughts from their hive-mates.
In the story i first wanted to make about the hive-men, a big part of it was about an earthman finding himself inducted into the hive, and having the neural biotech grow inside him... and finding that all his individual neuroses, worries, etc, were obliterated as he found the sweet release of ego death, losing himself into the hive. Like when people surrender to a cult, basically, but this cult doesn't have a tyrannical leader, and operates as a super-organism... which to me seems a little more appealing.
Now, because this is science fiction, I like to think that the hive, as a collective mind, would be a bit more sophisticated than an ant colony, and perhaps capable of more abstract thought - daydreaming great symphonies, pondering philosophical and scientific problems with the brain power of the whole hive, that sort of thing. Not just reactive, but pro-active. But the rich, subjective internal life that is the heritage of all humans might not be as useful, or as possible, when you're sharing your thoughts and brainpower with ten thousand other people.
As a final little thought, I do imagine that these hive men would have began as a voluntary experiment by scientist types, somewhere out in the rings of saturn, far from the prying eyes of earth. Perhaps starting as a more traditional cultish organization, to start, but I'd like to think that the practical problems of living as a super-organism in deep space would temper the more extreme elements.
(but another story idea i would like to flesh out, one day, would be the bad side of other hive-people - non-biotech hive cults prone to mass religious mania, etc. There's a lot of room to play in...)
THE CONSENSUS OF THE HIVE - A new chapter of the story "HALE-BOPP" drops today! READ IT ALL HERE!
Now I’m only antiquated to the WEBTOON comics but I noticed amongst the Griz Grobus sequel lore book there was a tidbit on Hive-men, I’m assuming that was a bit of a reference to Humanity Lost? And if it’s alright can you go into more on this lore?
Ah this is an interesting wrinkle - not to toot my own horn too loud, but by god, my hive men predate humanity lost by a good few years!
They first arose while I was working on Prophet and collaborating with my friend Matt Sheean on a story about hive-men on mars, back in 2013 (that never quite materialized into a solid story)- with the main thrust of the tale being not about the hive as an inexorable mindless mass, enslaved to a queen (which is the usual villainous hive depiction), but with the hive as a sort of beneficial, eusocial, communitarian approach to living on a hostile world - contrasted well against the individualistic, identitarian and ultranationalistic worldviews of the earthmen trying to conquer them. (Ive read enough sci fi with the same mindless hive army...)
(below - one of matts drawings for the hive city)
But their first visual appearance of my version was sometime in 2015, i think, for the Island magazine cover posted below. (Trade between baseline humans of some type and the hive men, goods being carried by silk-line to the great dyson tree...)
The first tale of the hive men i made (second ever story on my patreon) was drawn in 2017, and covers a dyson-tree habitat (in this case, grown around the comet hale-bopp) encountering a voracious organism of the void:
The latest story of the hive-men, drawn in 2021, is about an interloper earthman, a deserter from an invading army, who has found a new living among the martian hive-people, in a story called "A Portrait of the Artist as Hive Parasite" (colored by my longterm collaborator, Sergey Nazarov - without him i would wither and perish)
These stories can be found on my patreon, and they'll also be showing up in print (at some point, probably next year) once I get my next short story collection sorted. Hell, they'll probably end up online on webtoons soon enough, too!
