posted
I wandered- why killing only one Queen of the Hive was enough to win the second Invasion? I mean, there must have been many more Queens that could steer the Formids? Or perhaps a Formid can be controlled by it's mother?
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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quote: I wandered- why killing only one Queen of the Hive was enough to win the second Invasion?
According to the book, the bugger homeworld actually had all their queens on it, since they recalled all their queens to the homeworld when the war started.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Ah, you're right. Second invasion. I missed that.
And, yeah, I think you answered your own question, Szymon. I've always assumed that each bugger could only be controlled by its "parent" queen.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Its a hierarchy of Control I believe. The "Hive Queen" the Original queen (or rather I think the direct decendant of) who brought peace to the Bugger Homeworld (as revealed in the images that Ender recieved from the new cocconed hive queen) is the brain of the entire operation. However when the buggers began their "Great Expansion" into the stars she gave birth to new "sub-hive queens". These Queens had direct control over the buggers that where their children. The queen that Mazer Killed was such a queen, thus all the buggers that were her children lost their will to live.
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I always assumed that the formics, in their naive way of life, believed that they were just routinely "cleaning out" the planet. They probably wouldn't need more than one queen for the job. It also might have to do with distance constraints, though I guess the ansible wouldn't exist if that were true.
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I like the hierachy of control explanation. The Original Queen had control over the sub-queen, so they were still connected and coordinated, but when the sub-queen present at the Invasion was killed, all the buggers under her went out of commission. Makes sense to me anyways ...
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I think of it this way: each hive queen is like a brain, and they each have their own workers which comprise their body, right?. The second invasion consisted of one Bugger "person". That is to say, a single queen and a bunch of workers under her control alone. Therefore, killing the brain rendered the body useless. It's not like another "brain" (ie. another hive queen) many light years away could just assume control of the limp body.
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Actually they can. But it isn't easy. Normally, the philotic link that allows a Hive Queen to directly control her workers is formed as part of the biological process of giving birth. Taking over an individual worker of another Hive Queen would be a significant undertaking. Taking over enough of them to do anything meaningful about regaining control of her fleet would be basically impossible, as well as being pointless, since without her there cannot be any colonization.
Also, the other Hive Queens were rather in shock over the whole thing. In the process of figuring out what had happened and what they should do about it, they realized that each of the hundreds of millions of humans they had already killed were sentient individuals. I very much doubt there were more than a few tens of thousands of Hive Queens. So it was rather an enormous blow to their collective self-ideation.
The initial solution they came up with was to play dead and hope that humanity didn't come looking for them. An understandable response, if somewhat naive.
Posts: 763 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I thought it was because, A) They were in shock. And B) they didn't have a reason to fight anymore since the queen they sent to colonize was dead.
Posts: 503 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Survivor: The initial solution they came up with was to play dead and hope that humanity didn't come looking for them. An understandable response, if somewhat naive.
I don't know about play dead. They did build a pretty kickin fleet, after all. That said, I really do agree with most of your explanation.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Szymon: I wandered- why killing only one Queen of the Hive was enough to win the second Invasion? I mean, there must have been many more Queens that could steer the Formids? Or perhaps a Formid can be controlled by it's mother?
I don't think the killing of the queen actually ended the war. Though, I'm sure it looked that way to the humans, the second book makes clear that the buggers eventually understood that each human was an individual and decided themselves to halt their aggression. If that realization hadn't occurred, I'm sure more fleets would have been sent.
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Actually, the more I think about it, maybe that was explained at the very end of Ender's game. I've read too many versions of the story to remember exactly what was where... Posts: 9 | Registered: Oct 2005
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I think that the story would have been a lot more interesting if the Hive Queens had stuck with their original plan an hadn't built a fleet.
Posts: 763 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Survivor: I think that the story would have been a lot more interesting if the Hive Queens had stuck with their original plan an hadn't built a fleet.
It's been a while for me. What was this original plan?
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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yeah, that hierarchy looks nice. It sounds like Starcraft: in zerg "civilisation" thay had mastermind, just like the Main Queen of the Hive, and so called overlords. Not exactly the same, for they didnt give birth to zergs, but where sub-central control. The most naive thing done by the Queen was gathering all of the queens on their homeplanet. Of course, it is a perfect ending for a novel, but hey, Queen wasnt stupid, she saw what DrM is able to do, and was aware that humans are capable of killing a Queen. Anyway, shame we dont know what OSC thought.. (so far )
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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And one more thing- had Formids met another civilisation before? If not, haw did they know weapons? Buggers had no enemies but humans and sometimes "insubordinates" they had to pacify.
Or thay invented weapons AFTER they met humans, but then, how would they have "turned down" the crew of terran space ship on Eros?
And if they knew weapons BEFORE, they must have met another civilisation, and OSC would have written about it in SftD, X, or CotM.
Or before Buggers created one mastermind, the Queen with her philotic Web, they had to fight against one another.
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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quote:Actually they can. But it isn't easy. Normally, the philotic link that allows a Hive Queen to directly control her workers is formed as part of the biological process of giving birth. Taking over an individual worker of another Hive Queen would be a significant undertaking.
That wasn't my recollection at all. I thought that once a worker was bound to a particular hive queen (his mom, so to speak), that worker would go berserk around any other queen and try to kill it. I remember this, I think, from CoTM (or maybe Xenocide) when Ender, Plikt, Val, and Miro visit the Hive Queen as she's making another queen.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote: And one more thing- had Formids met another civilisation before? If not, haw did they know weapons? Buggers had no enemies but humans and sometimes "insubordinates" they had to pacify.
-Originally posted by Szymon.
The queen tells Ender that for thousands of years the queens fought eachother until the birth of two united queens. So they would have invented weapons for hive vs. hive combat.
Also they couldnt have met another species because the queen states that they didnt think intelligent life could exist without mind speak. If they had met intelligent life before they would know this.
Posts: 832 | Registered: Jan 2005
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The final plan seems to have worked out okay, fool humans into thinking that all the buggers were dead, while enlisting the aid of the one person that actually destroyed them. But the initial idea would have worked better, total disengagement and the sacrifice of a few planets.
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