Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Hive, by Jay Werkheiser

[Analog]
★★★★☆ A good hard-SF story.

(Colony SF) An alien hive mind encounters something strange and tries to understand it. The human colonists are even more clueless, even though they’re caught in the middle of a pending war. (5,184 words; Time: 17m)


"Hive," by (edited by Trevor Quachri), appeared in issue 01-02|20, published on by .

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Review: 2020.005 (A Word for Authors)

Pro: The fun of the story is watching the aliens and the humans experiencing the same events from utterly different standpoints. It’s refreshing to find aliens that are so alien that they and the
humans don’t even recognize each other as intelligent.

It’s noteworthy that the aliens come closer to figuring us out than we do to figuring them out. The humans conclude that if there’s any intelligent life, it’s nowhere near this site. But the aliens figure out that they need to look up to the stars.

Con: The characters aren’t all that interesting. Matt in particular is so pea-brained that one wonders why he was allowed to go out in the first place.

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Jay Werkheiser Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB, FreeSFOnline

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