Especially The Evolution Of Sapience Like That Shit Is My JAM - Tumblr Posts
THIIIIIISSSSS THIS THIS THIS. The centralized hive fallacy is seen prominently in Ender’s Game, where the queen is the unifying force. I don’t think most writers quite understand how much cooler it is to work with an emergent-sapient swarm or colony, especially if the component organisms are specialized. what it comes down to is that fundamentally, sapience isn’t limited to humanlike psychology or sociology. the intelligence that octopi, dolphins, corvids, etc display are all different, both from each other and from human intelligence, as products of their own specialized evolutionary lineages and niches.
The idea that hive minds in sci-fi have queens or some other central apparatus like a mother ship makes no sense at all. That completely defeats the purpose of a hive mind, which is decentralization.
It speaks to kind of society we live in where it’s generally assumed that unity is achieved through domination only.