My book is out in the world, getting read, and collecting reviews. It’s terrifying to have it out of my control, unable to fix a single thing about it, unsure who might love or hate it. But it’s also the most wonderful thing in the world when people praise it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading other things. One topic I keep thinking about lately is hive minds. I love reading books with various types of natural or artificial hive minds in them. Sometimes, they’re painted as terrifying. Other times, I find myself oddly drawn to the idea. Imagine not being alone inside my own head. Imagine being able to sing Palestrina with all the parts.

First, we need some kind of a definition of a hive mind. The term suggests bees, but do bees really have a hive mind at all? They’re eusocial, but that doesn’t make them the same thing as the Borg.

I would define the hive mind as a concept that centers around three key traits: connection, control, and a lack of individual identity. A hive mind contains separate bodies that are telepathically or digitally linked in some way—they can communicate with one another without words, so that their actions are coordinated in a way we can’t see. Many hive minds are also heavily portrayed as controlling: when you are assimilated into the Borg, you no longer have any free will. The third, a lack of individual identity, means that no matter how many bodies are part of the hive mind, you’re always interacting with a single being.

Not all hive minds have all three traits or give them the same focus, so I’ll talk about them separately.

Connection

This, I think, is the part I crave the most. Imagine having many others intimately close to you, such that you don’t even have to put your feelings into words for them to understand. Imagine that, even knowing your most secret and embarrassing thoughts, they still loved you. It’s hard not to want that.

The aliens in A Desolation Called Peace have this trait, though it’s not clear if they have either of the others. They don’t understand what it is to communicate—what’s the point of that? They share minds all the time. Another example is Deep Space Nine’s Founders. “The drop becomes the ocean, and then the ocean becomes the drop.” Total oneness.

This is also the lure of the Borg in more recent iterations. When the Borg first appear, they’re zombielike, terrifying. But by the time they show up in Star Trek: Picard, they’re much more seductive. Agnes, a heavily autistic-coded scientist, has always felt alone and isolated. She tries to make herself understood, but nobody really gets her. That’s how the Borg tempt her. Here, they promise, you’ll always be understood. They try the same spiel later on Jack. Feel rejected by people who were supposed to love you? You can never be rejected by the Borg.

It’s a great way to talk about humans’ desire for connection. Perhaps people are tempted by hive minds because they aren’t connecting with other humans the way they should. Or perhaps it’s just physically impossible for humans to be connected as much as we desire. We can also consider whether we really want that or only think we do. Isn’t it the separation between people what makes it possible for us to interact freely, sharing only what we want to?

Control

I have a bit of a pet peeve about this one. The queen in a hive of bees or an ant colony is not actually in charge. She’s the reproductive organ of the colony, so to speak. Ants appear to be self-organizing—the instincts of each one result in emergent behavior that is more than the sum of its parts. Likewise, when starlings murmurating at sunset all turn in the air at once, there’s no boss starling shouting orders. They just all know, somehow, to react in the same way.

But it’s a common trait of fictional hive minds, so it’s important to talk about. Is it possible for perfect communion and perfect freedom to coexist? It might not be! If you’re literally sharing your whole mind with the collective, your one measly will might not be enough to resist the force of what the whole group wants. It ends up being a metaphor for communism, for totalitarianism, for cults—for all the forms of collectivism the writers find most terrifying.

The Borg Queen is a symbol of this, though personally I’ve always felt the she was a mistake. The Borg, as first introduced, speak in an eerie chorus. We really feel that they are, in fact, one mind distributed through thousands of bodies. Add in the Queen, and she ends up being a much more comprehensible villain. People can look her in the eye and negotiate with her. So much more frightening, more difficult to know how to deal with, when the voices are coming from all directions and you can’t meet all the eyes at once.

But it’s a way of making clear the core fear. You’re not just one drop in the ocean. Your will isn’t even a part of the collective. You’re just a limb.

Lack of Identity

This is hard for humans to grasp, so it’s no wonder that it’s sometimes left completely out of the concept of a hive mind. But it’s actually the least terrifying of the traits.

The world is organized into many types of collectives. We are part of a galaxy. We are part of a species. The body is composed of many parts. Each cell is like a little city. Which of these counts as a person?

Humans usually think of our personhood ending at our skin. The part that does the thinking is just our brain, but we think of our whole body as us. No matter how much we love our neighbor, it’s impossible to feel the level of visceral unity about the guy next door as we feel about our leg. Meanwhile we do not usually worry whether our leg is really happy in its role of walking around for us. That’s not us, that’s a part. If it has gangrene, we’ll likely accept its removal so the rest of us can live. We won’t like it, but we don’t feel we’re being mean to our leg. It’s just a leg.

This is one of the natural, basic things about being human that we take for granted. So imagining a being that does not feel like that seems very strange. But bees and ants don’t seem to think of themselves as having any particular value as individuals. Bees will happily fling themselves at a threat even though stinging will kill them. Ants will die, one after another, in a sticky spot so the rest can march over their backs. You can even convince an ant that it is dead by putting the wrong scent on it, and it’ll march over to the graveyard and stay there.

It’s eerie, right? But your white blood cells do the same thing all the time, flinging themselves at an invader even though it’ll kill them. Your cells will burst themselves when it’s time for them to go, without all the scrabbling for a few minutes more of life that a human might do. The ant, like the blood cell, doesn’t think of itself as a person. It thinks of itself as a part.

I imagine hive minds could be similar. With one fully unified consciousness among many bodies, it wouldn’t mind sacrificing a few to a good cause. Can you imagine having body after body flung at you, just so more could swarm over the corpses and give you a message in a chorus of voices? I’d poop my pants, and if you think you wouldn’t, you’re bolder than I am.

My favorite hive mind of all time is the ancillaries in the Imperial Radch series. Justice of Toren is thousands of years old and composed of hundreds of bodies. Yet when it thinks of itself, it gives no more thought to each body than you do to your different limbs. Only when those bodies are separated for some reason do they have to learn how to function with only one set of eyes and hands.

My favorite part is always when they sing.

“My bodies sweated under my uniform jackets, and, bored, I opened three of my mouths, all in close proximity to each other on the temple plaza, and sang with those three voices.”

I used to sing polyphony and haven’t had a choir to sing with in years. So that one image makes me relate to what it’s like more than anything: to be one person, to sing with three voices. Maybe it’s something like being one of twenty people who sing with one voice. It can’t fail to appeal to me.

Am I saying I want to be a Borg?

No. Well—[kombucha.gif] maybe. But mostly no. I’m saying hive minds don’t always have to be a thing of horror. For a being that was truly meant to be that way, that didn’t want anything different, it could be a beautiful way of living.

Even if—perhaps especially if—it’s incomprehensible to the humans around. One thing science fiction does so very well is painting a picture of something weird, horrifying, disturbing . . . and then showing us how to accept and understand it. Not everyone has to be like you. Not everything has to make sense to your mind. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations means, sometimes, diversity that makes us uncomfortable. But it’s always worth trying to understand.