A thrillingly original dystopian murder mystery – think The Hunger Games meets A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder!

A FUTURE QUEEN LIES MURDERED …

Justice is merciless in the Hive, a monarchy of tomorrow, where young bodyguard Feldspar awaits execution, guilty of being alive when her charge is dead.

The girl has one defender – Niko, a royal maverick. Together they have three days to prove the impossible.

Three days to question everything Feldspar knows about the world that raised her and discover who the real murderer is . . .

A thrillingly original YA murder mystery, set in a dystopian colony with fantasy elements

Features a dangerous future monarchy, a richly imagined world based on the society of bees, and a hint of romance

For fans of Neal Shusterman, Holly Black and Suzanne Collins

The Hive is available now – you can order your copy HERE

Bees as a model for human society

by Anna February

Dystopia is back! I wonder why on earth it should be undergoing a resurgence at this particular moment in human history. (Pointedly refrains from gazing around at a world on fire.)

As a person who is naturally anxious about almost everything, ranging from the personal to the global, you might think I would prefer to avoid writing in a genre that predicts a miserable and desolate future for humanity. Yet in fact, dystopia is beautifully freeing. The worst has already happened! The fire raged unchecked until there was nothing left to destroy! And now that only ashes are left, we have a chance to find the hope in the situation. Because there will be some. In any situation, however dark, there is always hope.

The Hive is set in a post-climate-change world, because climate anxiety is definitely near the top of my long list of anxieties. In fact, it’s a version of our world, though more extreme than anything that could really happen on this planet. Sea levels have risen so high that the tops of mountains are all that’s left above the surface, and the weather is such a fierce and inhospitable combination of intense sun and fearsome storms that no one can live above ground. So the remnants of the human population live in underground colonies built into those mountaintops, the sole remaining safe places between the floodwaters and outside.

The book is set in one such colony, the Hive itself. As you can imagine, these colonies are restricted in the amount of space and resources they have to offer. People don’t leave the Hive unless they’re forced to, because there’s nothing for them beyond its walls except death. They have no way to get hold of food, materials or anything else beyond what they already have the technology to grow, build or recycle. They are wholly dependent on what the colony gives them.

And when I was writing the book, I spent some time thinking about what sort of shape this society would take. Would people have learned their lesson from the disaster that had befallen them? Would the survivors work together for a common future, treat each other as equals, place as much importance on the natural world as on themselves? Would they do better?

The answer, as always with humans, is probably yes and no. Because if there’s one thing you can rely on us to do, as a species, it’s to learn the wrong lesson. Which is where the bees come in. (Only took 400 words or so.)

Bees have become, for me, something of a symbol of hope in the face of climate change. If we still have bees then we’re probably not doomed yet; conversely, if the bees are gone … well, you can complete the logic yourself. They’re our most effective pollinators. They do a huge unpaid job that saves our farmers a vast amount of money and keeps the ecosystems around us running. If all our bees went extinct, we wouldn’t follow them straight away. But there would be an enormous global impact in terms of the cost, availability and diversity of the plants we eat, drink and wear – and an equally enormous global impact in terms of the endangerment or extinction of many other species.

Lucky, then, that we’re not destroying our bees’ habitats, killing them with pesticides and threatening them with climate change, right?

In the world of The Hive, of course, bees have already died out, along with any other species that either couldn’t survive in the harsh conditions or relied on another species that couldn’t do so (living things are all so tightly interlinked, after all). But I imagined that the survivors of the climate disaster, setting out to create the rules of their new colony, might look back at the bee and, like me, see it as a symbol of hope. More than that, they might see it as a model for the future. Because there is no such thing as selfishness or greed in a bee colony. All the bees act as one for the good of the whole. To our desperate colonists, that might seem the perfect antidote to the sort of short-sighted, every-man-for-himself behaviour that led them to where they are now. They might adopt the bee as a symbol of their intention to work together and to put humanity as a collective before themselves as individuals.

But, as we’ve already established, humans always learn the wrong lessons.

The Hive, as a colony now hundreds of years past its founding, has evolved away from that utopian, egalitarian ideal. Because there are other things that humans can learn from bees, and not all of them are necessarily beneficial. For instance, bees are generally very focused on their own hive. A bee from another hive will not be welcome – and indeed, hives tend to have guard bees outside to prevent foreign bees from entering, because the foreign bees are probably there to steal honey. The dedication of individual lives to the wellbeing of the colony also means that no single bee’s life matters except the queen’s. To a certain extent, the rest of them are expendable.

In humans, the result of those lessons is a colony that distrusts outsiders and preserves its own interests rather than working together with other colonies to improve the world. It exploits its people, using them as resources, and casts them out if they are no longer able to fulfil their function. It puts the ruling class – who control the reproductive technology required to procreate in a world where fertility has been severely damaged by chemicals and toxins – above everyone else. In fact, what we’ve ended up with is a xenophobic class hierarchy in which a handful of people possess all the wealth and power, and everyone else is disposable. (This may or may not seem strangely familiar.)

However, as I said, there is always hope! The Hive is a book about a girl who has been brought up with a single purpose: to protect and serve a possible future queen, buying her safety with her own life if necessary. In fact, her life is bound to her charge’s: if the royal daughter dies, she dies too. Yet it’s not a spoiler to say she fails. Her charge is killed. Not only that, but she doesn’t die herself as she was meant to. What follows is a murder mystery, but also an exploration of what happens to someone when everything that she’s been taught gives her life meaning is stripped away – when she is no longer part of the hive mind, and is therefore able to think for herself for the first time.

This is where, of course, we differ from bees: we don’t naturally subsume ourselves into the collective will. We are inherently individual. Which may lead to our downfall, if we allow our individualism to trump (!) our drive towards collective good. But it may also be our salvation. Because unlike bees, we have the ability to identify the unfairness baked in to our societies and to strive to change it. We can use our individualism for both the good of our species and the good of ourselves. We just have to strike that balance.

The Hive is available now – you can order your copy HERE

Anna February is reliably informed that she cried non-stop for the first two years of her life. Then she learned to read, and suddenly the world didn’t seem so terrible after all.

Being a STEM editor by day and a fantasy author by night means that Anna spends the vast majority of her time trying to arrange the right words in the right order, but her other interests include drawing, board games and large amounts of chocolate. She also writes books for older readers under the name A.F.E. Smith.