Spencer Ellsworth’s newest novel in the Starfire Trilogy is Shadow Sun Seven. At Tor.com he tagged five top works of SF that turn weird bug behavior into great fiction, including:God’s War and Remote-Controlled BeetlesRead about another entry on the list.
This one is more of weird human behavior imposing on the poor bugs.
The “bugpunk” of Kameron Hurley’s God’s War and the rest of the Bel Dame Apocrypha series is, on its surface, magic, but it’s really a refined science, using pheromones and other stimulants to control a wide variety of bugs, big and small. In this sense, the “magicians” of the book are more like electricians.
We might not need to spread various forms of human culture across a wide swath of planets to get bugpunked, though—scientists at DARPA have beenworking for several years to create “cybugs,” bugs who are injected with microchips during larval or chrysalis stages. (Which kind of makes humans the parasitic wasps in this scenario. Hmm…)
The “cybugs” would then have all sorts of interesting applications for the humans who control them—scouting out a battlefield or a rescue zone, or even generating electricity from the rotations of their wings. The last would pretty much put us on a path to God’s War. As the setting of God’s War is a bit of a rough place, aspiring Nyxissas, hit the dojo now.
God’s War is among Jeff Somers's twelve top kick-ass women from sci-fi and fantasy, Adrian Tchaikovsky's top five books featuring adventuring parties, and Joel Cunningham's seven top sci-fi books featuring strong women.
My Book, The Movie: God’s War and Infidel.
--Marshal Zeringue
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