The Collective
Dystopian Fantasy Thriller - On Sale Now!

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About the Author
Unrepentently intense, occasionally productive, and recently Whitesnake-style vagabond, David Steigelfest has finally climbed off his lazy ass and written something. He otherwise describes himself as a golf hacker, tennis scrapper, and spectacularly slow marathon runner. You may be shocked to learn he does NOT make his living as a writer.When he's not watching Syracuse or Philly sports, you can find David in various online forums trying to convert others to his own pet GoT theory: that Gendry is actually the true-born son of Cersei and Robert.

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Excerpt - Chapter 3:"He was dreaming of pleasant things. All was well until it wasn’t. It started as the shapeless, primal terror of a nightmare, but the essential darkness he feared coalesced around a single malevolent essence that stalked him. He felt panic and wanted to flee, aware that all he had to do was wake, but he did not know how. Waking comes from the other side, he remembered, the conscious side, but here the rules were different. Suddenly constrained, he tried to cry out in outrage, but he had no voice, and what remained of his being was cast even further from where he knew he must go. The crucible of darkness then came upon him and enveloped him, suppressing him still further and he sensed its nature twisted within oceans of hatred and malice.Then, he was torn away from himself and violently thrown into chaos. A thousand images flashed through his mind, followed by ten thousand more. Giant insects were everywhere. Bees. Near him. On him. Antennae probing out between large black eyes. The eyes! Vast depths of numbing black. The eyes were absorbing him, like a great whirlpool into darkness, and when he ultimately hit bottom, they were not the eyes of the other. They were his eyes.And he could see, but he could not choose what he saw. The perspectives all came at once, overwhelmed him, and left him with no respite. Then, finally, something familiar: a bit of blue sky. Leaves of a tree. The side of a structure. The Bed and Breakfast!
The terror intensified, a new idea taking hold that he had been cut loose, adrift, and that he'd never return. Was he trapped? Forever? All sense of time was lost. A window. His window. The angles of view changed, but he wanted to see in, so he did. He was flying. No, the bees were flying, but he flew with them. He was them, and they were him. Distorted and ever-changing angles, but he could see. He saw Judy enter the room. He saw what looked like himself get up from the bed. He bumped hard into the glass, feeling pain, falling from the air, and losing sight, but then regaining it. Now with multiple perspectives, he saw through the window again. He watched not-himself standing on the other side. It was him, but it wasn’t. How could it be? He saw that version of himself strike Judy with an open hand. He let out a scream but had no mouth. He launched at the window, felt more pain, and fell many times. He then saw himself look towards the window and smile. The vibrations around him intensified with his emotions.The hive was active, both scared and angry. Time passed, but he could not tell how much. Then there was smoke and a sense of panic and danger. More chaos followed, and a sense of dread and death took him. He awaited the end hopelessly, the hive slowly dying. And then, the impossible - a face he recognized.For a moment the views coalesced into one, but soon burst once more into the view of a thousand eyes. But they no longer saw blue sky, yellow sun, leaves, and trees. The bees saw each other, and larvae growing in sealed golden cells. They saw a massive green hedge. They saw a naked, silver-haired woman stretched out on the ground. They saw glimpses of the Hab roof and greenhouse from every conceivable angle. They saw a 10-year-old boy in a torn shirt crouched low on an overhanging scaffold looking down on himself. The boy had a trickle of blood that ran down from his right eye.Jeight snapped back to wakefulness, and let out an audible scream."

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Sci-Fi or Fantasy?
Apparently, some people care!

By now, everyone is aware I wrote a book. How could they not be (aware), considering I remind everyone who passes my way? One thing I’m frequently asked is the book genre. I want to say, ‘who cares? Just read it!’, and then I recall that other people have lives, tastes, and priorities that have nothing to do with my ego. It’s an annoying realization but one I must contend with.So, I shall answer the question about my book’s genre in a typically long-winded fashion. Before I begin, however, I feel the need to patronize you with some background and details about the culture of science fiction and fantasy literature enthusiasts, also known as ‘nerds’. One dirty little secret about nerds is that we’re snobs. We coalesce in little nerd groups around the things we love, and hold other, quite similar things, in contempt. Even in the specific sub-group of epic fantasy literature, nerds will hard align to their favorite authors and post 10,000-word missives on why Martin is better than Tolkien. For example, anyone who puts Sanderson over Abercrombie should be forced to wear a scarlet S, but I digress. The point is that while there ARE sub-genres of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, there are sub-genres of those sub-genres. It is the equivalent of liking historical fiction, but specifically American Civil War historical fiction. Had enough mansplaining yet? Good.So where does The Collective fall? It was a conscious goal of mine as I was writing the book to avoid it being science fiction. I walked the line, and I’ll get into that in a moment, but in my opinion, I succeeded. Therefore, my answer to the genre question has always been ‘Dystopian Fantasy’. Yes, I have answered the question. No, we are not done!How does one ‘walk the line’ and remain out of the realm of Sci-Fi? For me, it was a litmus test. Am I introducing technology that does not currently exist in some form? Can people grow enough food to live in a desert enclosure? Can you condense enough water from dry, desert air? It was enough for me to answer these questions with a ‘yes’. I did not consider the economics of such technology. With enough power, you can do a lot of things. Would such a structure be possible today? Yes, but at great cost. Along the way, we encounter some other tech. No spoilers, but the litmus test remained the same. Does the technology exist in some form on Earth today? As long as the answer was ‘yes’ — I was fine with it, ignoring completely the costs of manufacturing and operating it at scale.People are welcome to disagree with my litmus test. I hope you do, and that you get really angry about it, for this would mean you’ve read my book and care enough to have such an opinion. Let’s hear it!As for fantasy, the niches run deep! There’s high fantasy, epic fantasy, urban fantasy, sword and sorcery, romantasy, paranormal, fairy tale…, and the list goes on. Of course, there is overlap and I believe The Collective is not easily labeled. The truth is, I wrote it without giving much consideration to such things. I would guess this is true for most authors. We have a story to tell and we tell it. Ideally, that would be it, and then I’d get rich on adulation and book sales. It appears unlikely for that to happen, so now it is incumbent upon me to market the book, and that includes classifying it so people can decide if they want to read it or not. Annoying, right?So, I’ve already said the book is a dystopian fantasy. It is about a future society where things are ‘not good’, with flashbacks to the world that was. It is important to note that this world is ‘our world’. Earth. It isn’t a fantasy world. It is not Middle Earth or Westeros. It is a story about Earth and, cough cough (spoilers), Earthlings. Finally, I will briefly answer the question of what makes this ‘fantasy’ at all. Well, the answer also involves spoilers, but for comparison’s sake, let’s look at some of the zombie dystopias. In The Walking Dead, the ‘fantasy’ element would be a virus that causes animated zombies. In The Last of Us, the ‘fantasy’ element is a fungus that invades, controls, and animates humans. Regardless of whether you believe such a thing is possible in the future, it does not exist on Earth today, and is therefore ‘fantastical’.As for The Collective, aligned with how I prefer the content I consume, I strove to keep such elements to a minimum and as mysterious as possible. There will be (some) answers of course, but I do not want this to be the focal point, nor do I want things to devolve into overpowered, superhero nonsense. You can tell me if I have succeeded.Happy reading!David
Jan. 11, 2025

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MiloThe audacity of these people. They call me crazy.
Yeah, I’m the crazy one, you fucking nutjobs!
A solitary queen bee. That’s what they bring me?
“Can you make a hive?”
Me? Make a hive? As if it was up to me.
No, I’m afraid not. I can’t do that. Other bees can help do that, but this queen - she’s dying.
Sprayed with insecticide, the nerdy kid told me. Yeah - yeah, I know - it’s ironic. I’m a bee expert, and I call someone else a nerd. I know what people think of me. Some weirdo who likes insects more than people.
They’re not wrong. Bees are at least predictable.A call in the middle of the night. My new friend, the nerd - Dan, I think he said his name was –shows up with a solitary queen bee… “Can you make a hive?”He has no clue what it will take. This queen - he even admitted it, has been exposed to insecticide. She’s not worth the effort. I have lots of queens. If he wants to raise bees I can give him one. Hell, I’ll give him a whole hive … if it means I can go back to bed.But this weirdo is crying. Says his friend’s life depends on it. I’ve heard some crazy shit. In fact, most people start stories about me with - ‘you won’t believe this crazy guy I met’, and now I’m telling similar stories about this guy, Dan. His friend’s life depends on my saving this queen and using her to start a hive? Yeah.. sure.ok, dude. Stop the crying. This is fucking pathetic. It’s 4 in the morning. Give me a break.So I drop ‘his’ queen under a magnifying glass. She’s definitely dying, but maybe it isn’t insecticide. 12 hours on her own - without attendants isn’t too bad - at least according to Dan, but if her hive was compromised days ago - who knows how long she’s really been on her own.She comes from upstate NY somewhere …this guy says. I don’t even want to hear this story - but it’s coming out anyway. A hive on the limb of a tree - the whole limb cut off - crashing to the ground, dragged away into the woods… and then sprayed with something.
And here I am with some weirdo, NYC nerd, staring at the queen of this hive, as if that makes sense. Yea sure, it’s perfectly logical that he grabbed the queen from some random upstate-NY-hive and brought her to NYC with him -...
…then made contact with Roscoe, and then Roscoe calls me - and here we are. Sure this all makes complete sense.Roscoe’s a good dude. He asked me to save this queen as a personal favor. They’re all fucking nuts.Under magnification, she looks ok. Not too banged up. I hold her firm in some tweezers - not too firm. Knock it off; I know what I’m doing.I hold her firm, and I clean her. Bath time. Bath time for the buzzing bee. I brush her gently with a wet brush. This ain’t easy. Do it wrong and she dies. But I know what I'm doing. She needs to stank her stank.ok - that was crude. haha. She has to smell like a queen. Your majesty - you need to lay down your royal stink.Got to make sure your pheromones are working properly, or this will never work. No pheromones, no hive. No hive, and Danny boy cries. No hive and somehow - Danny boy’s friend dies? Yeah right.So - I clean her up pretty good. She’s stanking that stank all right.Next step is to try to introduce her …
And I tell Danny boy they’ll either attend to her or kill her.
He doesn’t seem to like that approach. He asks me for odds. What do I look like, a bookie? I wouldn’t bet on either outcome, I tell him. I guess that means fifty-fifty. He wants to know how to improve the chances. I tell him I just did that by ensuring his little lady friend is giving off her pheromones properly.Her new friends need to recognize her as a queen, and then they must accept her as their queen. Two steps. I feel pretty good about step 1. I don’t tell Dan that if step 2 fails, the workers will tear her apart. He doesn’t seem to be in a state of mind to accept that outcome.Doesn’t matter though - if it goes down that way, it goes down that way. I’ll tell Roscoe I’m sorry - I did my best. And it’ll be true. Dan the man won’t like it. I mean - like really not like it, but what can I do? I don’t make hives, I already told you.I put her in a little cage and drop her into a queenless colony. I happen to have one of those.. I mean it happens all the time, but for Roscoe I’d have made it queenless, if you catch my drift. Don’t see how it makes any sense though. Danny boy seems to have fallen in love with his queen. In she goes..Lo and behold!... the workers recognize her as a queen. She be stanking that stank!Nothing left to do now but let her out of the cage. That would suck if they pull her to pieces. If that happens, maybe I’ll lie to this guy, Dan, and let Roscoe deal with the fallout? That’s not nice. C’mon ladies.. don’t kill her.I open the cage and they rush to her. No - No.. wait.. yes. They’re attending to her. They aren’t killing her. This is gonna work!Yes - they’re feeding her. They’re cleaning her. And would you look at that… She’s gonna start laying eggs.I’m gonna buy Dan a cigar.

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