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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Hive Mind | ||
| A group mind. |
As far as I know, the first use of this phrase in mainstream science fiction magazines.
| "They must be constantly in telepathic rapport with each other. Something like the "hive mind" of the bees, even further developed. Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence, just as their bodies combine. They're at least semi-intelligent, judging from the way they were working." |
| Technovelgy from The Face of the Deep,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Captain Future in 1942 Additional resources -
|
If you poke around, you can find earlier usage of the idea, but not in science fiction. For example, in The Philosophy of a Commoner published in 1928, there is this idea:
Science fiction writer James Schmitz picked up the same phrase for use in Second Night of Summer (1950):
Compare to the ring-table from The Universe Wreckers (1930) by Edmond Hamilton, a device which creates a group mind among participants ("...the great metal globe whose strange mechanism made of the thirty minds of the Council members a single mind"). Another example would be the racial mentalities described in StarMaker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon. See also the group ego from Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein. Another similar idea is composite living from The Day the Aliens Came (1995) by Robert Sheckley.
Concerted action of ants, bees, indicates an intelligence not the aggregate of individuals—one intelligence apart directing—a hive mind instead of a bee mind.
"Many very efficient life-forms aren't physically complicated, you know," she went on, letting the sound of her voice ripple steadily into its mind. "Parasitical types, particularly. It's pretty certain, too, that the Halpa have the hive-mind class of intelligence, so what goes for the nerve systems of most of the ones they send through to us might be nothing much more than secondary reflex-transmitters."
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Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton
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