Books: Her Majesty’s Swarm

By Shelley Pallis.

And then she woke up, and she’d been transported to the world of her favourite real-time strategy engine. These light novels don’t hang about, do they? The woman known only as BugSis confesses in a prologue that in her favourite computer game (coyly unmentioned), she always used to love playing the arachnid army, because they were scary, but also fun. And now, for reasons that defy understanding (“never apologise, never explain” apparently being the motto of many a Japanese YA novelist), she has been teleported into the game itself, and hailed as the arachnid queen by her spidery subjects.

So, whereas How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom asked what it might be like to turn around a fantasy nation from the safety of a kingly throne, Her Majesty’s Swarm puts a girl-gamer in the hotseat, bestowing her with a realm of savage creepy-crawlies. What could possibly go wrong?

“And so, I became the Queen of the Arachnea – a choice that would transform me into the most abhorrent, terrifying butcher of all.”

All righty, then. Light-novel titling being as on the nose as it is, I guess we’re lucky this wasn’t called How I Became the Queen of an All-Devouring Army of Fascist Spiders. But our nameless heroine, her Earthbound identity fading beneath the brain-fog of the arachnid hive-mind, reasons that if she ever wants to get back to Japan, first she has to stay alive, and that means adopting the savage, ravenous tactics of her newly adopted army. Sort of like if Doctor Who were trapped in Nazi Germany, and decided the only way to get his TARDIS back was to invade Poland.

And yet… she can’t help herself. Because when she leads her horde towards the first village full of polite elfin vegetarians, she realises that this is not the game-world that she remembers. This is a world that has never heard of the Arachnea before, where the people are entirely defenceless. And as BugSis starts to speculate, maybe there is a way to get through this without murdering every soul she encounters. She puts her Worker Swarms to work making silken clothing, which she flogs off to make money for meat. She protects the elf people from the religious fundamentalist slavers who prey upon them, and before long, I was wondering if the light-novel over-long title of this might instead have been How I Decided to Put My Horde of Ravenous Fascist Spiders to Work Making Pants and Fighting Crime .

When the author’s name is apparently 616th Special Information Battalion, and the translator calls himself ZackZeal, it’s difficult to take this too seriously. BugSis has noble intentions for bucking the system, for using her swarm for good, although a historian might note that her behaviour mirrors that of countless warrior elites that rolled into many an ancient realm, offered to barter “protection”, and ultimately took over. Before this first volume is out, she has already annihilated a hapless kingdom of “religious zealots” and one of her elf-girl companions has volunteered for a painful, body-altering transformation to become one of the spider people. Since she can no longer remember her own name, one of her subjects gives her a new one, Grevillea, Queen of the Arachnea.

Grevillea is a compellingly unreliable narrator. We are never quite sure, and often neither is she, how much of her personality retains glimmers of the nice Japanese girl who just wanted to get home and weeps over the death of a single minion, and how much of her is now subsumed by the Arachnea hive-mind, ready to commit thousands of suicide-spiders to military objectives. But it seems that both personalities are duelling inside her, creating this oddest of narratives, in which an “evil” general in charge of a heartless war-band repeatedly tells herself and her charges that she is trying to make a better world, and that the ends justify the means. As she marches off to her next war, against a land of dragons, I felt a faint stirring in my own memories, of the Game of Thrones TV series that was coming to an end as “616th Special Information Battalion” began writing this book series, and of similar intimations of trouble attending the victories of the Mother of Dragons, Daenerys Targaryen. I remember a lot of fans being rather wrong-footed by her character arc in the closing episodes, as she went from being a poster-girl for hordes of gung-ho Thronies to being the villain in her own story. Her Majesty’s Swarm might switch dragons for different fantasy creatures, but similarly asks what it might be like to have all the power, and all of the luck, and not much sense of how to stop the juggernaut she has set in motion.

Her Majesty’s Swarm by “616th Special Information Battalion” is published by J-Novel Club. and available to pre-order from Anime Limited.