Hellstrom's Hive

I first read Helstrom's Hive in college in the early 70s. I re-read it a number of times over the years until I lost track of my copy. I was delighted to find it in the new audio releases.

Herbert tells a fascininating and provocative story about governemnt out of control in conflict with a new societal order. Throughout the fast paced story you are constantly pulled from one end of the story spectrum to the other, not sure who you want to prevail. Both groups are admirable and repellant. Beyond that are the disturbing implications for humanity if Helstrom's society could actually work.

I was a little worried that almost 40 years would make the story jarringly out of date, but I found that it still works well. Just as I re-read the original over the years, I expect to listen to this audio file again and again.

Like other Herbert books I was a bit confused for the first hour or so. I rated this book a five because toward the last few hours of the book I found myself looking for times to listen more of the story beyond my normal work commute listen. Overall an excellent story with great imagination. The book seems to just stop with about as loose ended ending as one could come up with. Herbert was either looking to write another book or was rushed to publish the book. I really wish it would have ended differently.

The narration is well done, though it seems the narrator sometimes gets a bit more, err, "excited" than it would seem the scene warranted. There are a lot of jumps between "scenes" (i.e. from the farm to the agency to the history of the queen) that don't seem to have enough of a pause between them - you'll be listening to events at the farmhouse then in the next breath it'll be a snippet from the history.

The first quarter of the novel has a lot of characters to keep track of which takes a bit more concentration than some novels might. In fact, a lot of the characters aren't fleshed out anyway so I'm not sure why they're even in there...

The story itself is almost good... it's definitely worth a 3 but certainly not a 4. Part of the problem with the story is that we aren't led to care about any of the characters - they are all rather plastic. Female characters are all cardboard cutouts and exactly what you'd expect from 1970s science fiction (but, to be fair, the males are also cardboard cutouts). And, even though the narrator is good enough so we know which character is "acting" at any given point, it doesn't really matter which one it is because for the most part they all seem to be interchangeable.

There are better scifi books from the 70s here on Audible (i.e. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang) so unless you can get this for less than the cost of a credit, or are looking specifically to read classic scifi, I wouldn't buy it.

A lot of books leave you hanging and waiting for the sequel but this one seemed to end right in the middle of the action. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it and can't wait for the sequel.

I rarely find a download that I can't finish. The narrator is ok, and probably the novel would be great as a novella. The agency stuff as mentioned by others is just too boring to make it through.