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The Big Idea: Marie Vibbert
2026-Apr-28, Tuesday 18:15![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Though humans have a strong desire to be an individual, slightly stronger is our innate need to not be alone. Humans are not solitary creatures, so why do we try so hard to act like we are all just individuals with no ties or connections to those around us? Author Marie Vibbert wonders if we wouldn’t all be better off as a hive mind in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Multitude.
MARIE VIBBERT:
Over 11,000 tons of discarded clothing lie in the Chilean desert. These are garments that never sold, from low and high brands, and almost entirely made of petroleum-based fabrics: rayon, polyester, acrylic. It’s a major environmental problem. The clothes catch fire, leak chemicals and microplastics, and just… keep coming.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, they are looking for new, industrial applications for wool because this renewable clothing resource that doesn’t spontaneously combust sits rotting in warehouses, unable to compete with the subsidized price of polyester.
Humanity has a problem. A communication problem that creates wasted effort and wasted resources. Food being thrown out while people starve. Diseases like cholera running rampant when their cures exist. I could go on and on with examples. Why can’t we put our efforts where they are needed? Why do our systems dictate so much cruel irony?
When you look at humanity as a whole, we are tearing ourselves apart, starving ourselves, killing ourselves. We don’t seem to understand that we are us?
These were my thoughts going into a project whose first note was: The Borg, but friendly?
I thought it would be a short story. Something quick. Get in and get out. A hive mind comes to Earth, tries to communicate with humans as a hive, fails, and sees what a mess we are. Nudge the reader toward empathy, toward seeing problems between “us” and “them” as an insufficient definition of “us.” I figured it’d hit about 2,000 words long. But the more I thought about it, the bigger the problem became. How to show the perspective? How to encompass humanity and then move the camera back to show us in perspective?
How do we look, to a hive mind? What would they expect?
Humans are, in many ways, a collective creature. A single human can no more build a skyscraper than a single ant can build a mound. Even writing a novel is a collective act, when you consider that this language that I am using is a vast collection of consensuses on symbols, meaning, and parsing. English, on a certain level, is a stack of inside jokes passed down and expanded every generation.
Beyond that, every work of fiction builds on and reacts to those that came before. I am writing in a genre, science fiction, defined by all the works labelled as such, and in turn defined by the pressures and uncertainties of our society that caused the first authors to write things not of this world, the first readers to like that and want to emulate it, and on, and on.
I was on a panel at WorldCon on Hive Minds in Science Fiction when it occurred to me that an assumption I hadn’t seen tackled yet was that collectivism automatically meant a repression of individuality. It seems an easy conclusion? If my family votes democratically on dinner, my individual desire to eat nothing but spaghetti every night is subordinated. Yet, the four of us are still individuals as we enjoy my spouse and child’s preferred chicken and rice.
Why wouldn’t a hive mind contain room for the individual? Does a Borg stop loving spaghetti once it absorbs the thoughts of thousands of chicken fans? Wouldn’t it be more of a conversation than a dictatorship? If it’s truly collective, why would there be dictators? And, come to think of it, don’t we, as large groups, change our opinions over time? Americans once ate more chipped beef on toast than chicken fingers. We thought the Edwardian S-bend corset and the mullet were a great ideas. We went from loving elephant leg jeans to skinny jeans. Collectively. Like an individual goes through phases of loving fly fishing or obsession with one particular series of books, societies go through a group fondness for orange or dark wood paneling.
At the risk of making this blog post nothing but rhetorical questions, why do we assume innovation is a characteristic of the individual? Why do we assign conformity to the collective alone?
I tried to imagine myself a hive-member. Many advantages came immediately to mind. I wouldn’t have had to gamble on picking a college major; I’d have access to the needs of the society around me to help find work that was needed. I wouldn’t be competing for the access to share my stories, I’d just tell them, and my hive would hear them and like them or not.
Competition is not just the “healthy” activity of small businesses or inventors, of students seeking academic awards. It’s also war. All around the world, humans are killing humans so that they can avoid sharing resources. Humans are defining others, drawing lines around some of their siblings and excluding others, to limit access to resources. Yet to a non-human observer, we are one species, one sprawling community, alike in our needs and wants and behaviors.
And humans can be so kind, too.
In 2023, I had to travel to New York City because I had to get a Visa to attend my first Hugo awards as a nominee, and as I sat in Central Park waiting for my appointment, admiring the unnatural warmth of the post-climate-change day, I saw a middle-aged man patiently leading a group of elderly people. He looked so happy. I dashed off four pages in my journal about him, imagining his life taking care of elders. I wondered why my science fiction stories weren’t as easy or as fun as simple character portraits. I enjoyed the flashes of lives I’d seen in short stories by Mary Grimm or Maureen McHugh, or the prose poems of Mary Biddinger.
I used to love to climb into a character’s head and walk around, show her worries and fears and daily chores, and then I’d show my work to science fiction writers and be told I had no plot, or perhaps I was “just” a poet. Because of this critique, I chose to wall off the desire to write the way that came most naturally, eschewing character-study and stream-of-consciousness in favor of sentences that “did something.” (My own term.) I began to focus on ideas, on technology, on concrete consequences and violent action.
Eventually, I got pretty good at it, good enough to feel its limitations. I opened up my old “plotless” stories and found them not so plotless, after all. Rather, they reflected my own sense of helplessness as a teen and early-twenties writer, and that point of view was uninteresting to the science fiction editor of the 90s and 2000s, who focused on competent characters moving the plot by choice.
At the young age of 47, I revised one of those 20-year-old “plotless” stories and sold it to a market paying the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s professional rate of eight cents a word. Not to brag. (Yes, to brag). In some ways, the genre itself has moved on from rigorously espousing action and certainty from its heroes, but also, I had learned how to structure a story through the mechanics of action, and this helped me see the similar structuring of non-action-based stories.
Part of the literary legacy my writing depends on is science fiction’s desire for logical, action-driven plots, but the origins of this project are the literary flash fiction piece, rooted in character and moment, and my desire to return to it, now that I have proven myself in the plot mines.
Which brings us back to the beginning: How better to show the individual in the collective of humanity than through a series of very short point of view pieces? The result is an introspective novella I wrote in thousand-word chunks around other projects. More than any other book I’ve written, I feel naked in its pages, exposing my deepest, most personal self. I felt free to do this because it was something I thought would never sell: too literary, too experimental.
Well, I sent it to Apex Books and they disagreed. I hope you enjoy, and be kind to my Space Cephalopods.
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Multitude: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
I still have more posts to do over my trip to Colorado (I cannot seem to get through that dang trip!), but I wanted to post about my experience at 
