Hellstrom's Hive

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In 1971 a feature-length movie called The Hellstrom Chronicle won the Oscar for Best Documentary (released in the UK the following year, it picked up the 1972 BAFTA for the same category). Directed by Walon Green and written by David Seltzer, it cast actor Lawrence Pressman in the role of Dr Nils Hellstrom, a fictional Swedish Professor. Over the course of the film Hellstrom presents a variety of fascinating documentary footage of insects, spicing its natural history with a quasi-apocalyptic commentary. His thesis is that insects have inhabited this world a lot longer than humanity, are better adapted to it, and will prevail where we will not. I recommend you check it out: the whole film, in sections, is on YouTube.

Hive, is a fictional elaboration of the premise of that movie. As such it is a fairly unusual piece of writing. We’re familiar, of course, with ‘novelisations’ of motion pictures, commonplace and usually low-quality cash-in exercises. On occasion writers pen sequels or prequels to successful films, sometimes to more interesting effect. But Hellstrom’s Hive is something different: an original novel of considerable power that takes the premise (and, of course, name) from a film in order to go in a radically new creative direction. The book is not a tie-in; it’s a kind of tie-out: a deliberate metamorphosis of one text into something much richer and stranger. In place of the effective but rather simple-minded documentary narrative of the film, Herbert creates a compelling apocalyptic thriller. Where The Hellstrom Chronicle is interested in insects, Herbert shifts the focus to people.

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