The Little Interview with Anna February - The Hive

The Little Bookshop
14 minutes ago
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ABOUT THE STORY

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…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One of the online biographies (publisher Chicken House) tells us that Anna loves drawing, board games, and chocolate! I think she will fit right in with our readers! Anna has been writing since a long time and did you know she’s also a STEM editor? ‘The Hive’ is her YA debut. Before this great YA debut, Anna also wrote ‘The Darkhaven’ series under the name A.F.E. Smith.

OUR LITTLE INTERVIEW

Writing process of The Hive

1. ‘The Hive’ is a murder mystery set in a dystopian world. How did your writing process go? Did you first outline the murder mystery or the dystopian landscape?

I always find that you can’t have plot without characters/setting, and you can’t have characters/setting without plot. So I would say, rather than one aspect preceding the other, it was more like an iterative process where the two developed alongside each other. Which means there were two seeds to start it off: the concept of the shield-bond, and a bodyguard who should have died with her charge but didn’t (the seed of the murder mystery); and the Spire, which as you know is the method by which the colony generates electricity from lightning, and lent itself to a future world that was both more technologically advanced and more limited than ours (the seed of the dystopian landscape). The society modelled on bees came slightly later, as a way to tie those two seeds together – but once I had that, everything else fell into place.

The Hardest Character to Kill in The Hive

2. This is going to be a spoiler (so everyone who has not read the book just yet SKIP this question). There are quite some murders in this story: who was the most difficult to kill off and why?

Euphemie’s death has by far the most impact on Feldspar – and this isn’t a spoiler at all, because Euphemie is Feldspar’s charge and the fact that she dies is on the back of the book! So in a way, Euphemie was the hardest to kill, in the sense that it hurt my protagonist the most. (In another way, she was the easiest to kill, because authors love to make their characters suffer.)

Getting into spoiler territory (you can read the following text if you go over it - the letters are white), I think the most difficult to kill off was the murderer’s shield. I won’t name the murderer or their shield, so hopefully even if someone does click on the spoiler who hasn’t read the book, they won’t find out enough to ruin it for themselves. But the book is partly about Feldspar coming to recognize the unfairness of the society she’s been raised in, and in particular the cruelty of the fact that a shield dies if their charge dies – that their whole life is built around and dependent on their charge. So it’s really sad that in the end she knows that truth, and she’d love to make the other shield see it too, but instead she has to kill them to protect herself.

Inspiration Behind Feldspar’s Character

3. I loved the character development of Feldspar; she’s such a strong yet vulnerable character who is willing to learn. Where did you get your inspiration for her?

I’ve always disliked the idea that vulnerability is the same as weakness, and it’s something I try to push back on in every book I write. Being physically strong doesn’t mean you’re not scared sometimes. Being capable doesn’t mean you’ll never be hurt. Being tough doesn’t mean you can’t show empathy or kindness. To write a fully rounded ‘strong’ character, I think you have to include both sides. Because that’s what true strength consists of, to me: courage, resilience and decency. Acting even though you’re afraid, holding space for your pain without letting it overwhelm you, and always trying to do the right thing.

As for willingness to learn, Feldspar has been conditioned (or brainwashed) her entire life to dedicate herself solely to Euphemie and to believe everything she’s told. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to overcome that sort of engrained belief system. But the catalyst for her doing so is Euphemie’s death. Most people have experienced some sort of loss and its accompanying grief, so readers will know that an event like that can have a profound effect on your sense of self. It can cause you to question the world in a way you never did when your life was on the expected track.

The Most Important Message in The Hive

4. There are quite some layers to this story, with plenty of messages about society and nature. What is the most important message to you?

I think what I would consider to be the most important message is a tricky one to put succinctly, but I’ll give it a go! In the world of the Hive, science is considered dangerous and unfit for royalty because it’s blamed for the Great Rising (a catastrophic climate change event in the past, in which the temperature increased and the sea levels rose drastically). It’s viewed as something that has to be kept under tight control to avoid another disaster. And on the face of it, you can see why a society on the other side of an event like that might blame science, because they probably wouldn’t be in this mess if not for the industrial revolution and the subsequent unrelenting use of fossil fuels.

But I hope it becomes clear over the course of the book that actually, we need science – or, more specifically, scientific thinking. We need logic and objective truth and a willingness to change our opinions in the face of the evidence. And when I wrote a world where science is seen as equivalent to the dark arts, I was drawing at least in part on the post-truth world we seem to be in now, where our leaders are happy to throw out the opinions of experts and act based purely on their own beliefs, in pursuit of their own interests. In some cases, they’re even happy to outright lie and to give those lies the same status as the truth. And we let them get away with it. We prioritize the subjective over the objective. To some extent, it already feels as if we’ve started to view scientific thinking as the enemy. Add in the rise of AI, and I’m concerned that we’re rapidly moving towards a world in which people will no longer have the information literacy skills to figure out what’s true/real/trustworthy, so they’ll simply believe whatever fits their own worldview … or whatever their leaders tell them. Without objective truth, you have no real democracy, which is what we see in the Hive.

This is why the dedication to my children at the front of the book is ‘keep asking questions’. Not because I want them to doubt everything and become conspiracy theorists (which is the other side of the same coin as believing everything without question), but because I want them to be able to tell the difference between a reliable, objective fact and an unreliable, personal opinion, and interrogate everything they’re told with that in mind.

Animal Inspiration: Which Society After Bees?

5. If you had to write another book set in a dystopian world and you need to use a different animal society - which one would you choose after the world of bees?

Bees work as a model for a dystopian society because they’re so vital to our current ecosystem, as pollinators of both the plants we consume and the plants that support the natural world around us. Therefore they make sense as a symbol of hope for the people who initially sought to create a new social structure in a post-climate-change world. And of course bees also have aspects that lend themselves to that society slowly evolving into something darker (the expendability of individual bees, the antagonism to anyone who isn’t part of their own hive).

So if I were looking for inspiration for another society, I’d want to pick another animal that’s a keystone species – a vital part of the ecosystem – with both hopeful and alarming characteristics, from a human point of view. Maybe corals? Climate change is probably their greatest threat, so a thriving coral reef is as much a symbol of hope as a thriving bee colony. And corals are so weird! They’re these tiny animals that have been slowly building the reef out of calcium carbonate for thousands of years. They have a symbiotic relationship with algae. They form the basis of a unique kind of ecosystem that’s full of life and vital for biodiversity – a bit like the ocean’s equivalent of the rainforest. And they’re eaten by parrotfish, which excrete the calcium carbonate and thereby create beautiful white tropical sands.

I have no idea what a dystopian society based on corals and parrotfish would look like, but maybe one day I’ll give it a go!

What's next after The Hive

6. Can you already give us a hint about your next book?

My next book is a sequel to ‘The Hive’. I can’t say too much about it, because at the time of writing it’s with my editor and she may want me to change all sorts of things! (you can read the following text if you go over it - the letters are white) But it’s about what happens to Feldspar and Niko when they leave the Hive in search of another colony, and what happens when they come back.

Bonus question

What are you reading at the moment?

I usually get through 8–15 books a month, so I’ll list you a few off my TBR and with any luck I’ll be reading one of them at the point when this interview goes live!

‘The Grief of Stones’ by Katherine Addison

‘Witness 8’ by Steve Cavanagh

‘The Cut ’ by Chris Brookmyre

‘All the Lost Souls’ by Amie Jordan

‘Things I Learned While I Was Dead’ by Kathryn Clark

ABOUT THE BOOK

I need to confess that, of course, I fell for the gorgeous cover! But you know what?! Inside this beautiful cover lies such a great story. In short: it’s a murder mystery in a dystopian world.

What happens when you believe your whole life in a system but then get accused of murdering your charge? Do you keep believing? Feldspar has three days to prove her innocence - will she still believe in the end? She’s strong yet vulnerable, she’s a character I loved reading about! The Hive is full of twists, a flawed political system, and great character development. And as a reader who looooves character development, my reader’s heart was extremely happy! Also want to share this interesting guest post Anna wrote for the fantasy-hive website.

Thank you so much, Anna, for answering all my questions AND for joining us (online) for a book club about The Hive in September!! Cannot wait!