(Yes, of course they occupy our minds; they're psychic!)
... But why are they philosophical? I mean, psychic.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall, my topic from last week, features an obligatory race of space insectoids called the Kir'ko, featuring utterly superfluous psychic powers. In this case the problem goes beyond my usual complaint that Telepathy Is A Dead End For Science Fiction and beyond my general complaint about Planetfall overusing telepathy even by the ever-so-stringent worldbuilding standards of pulp SF, because the Kir'ko in particular could have been perfectly impressive without their "fire brain laz0rz, pew-pew" angle. They're spindly, hyperaggressive melee monstrosities with unit upkeep discounts and a defensive clustering bonus to encourage swarm tactics, and can supplement that with armor-melting acid sprays. Their apex military unit, the Harbinger, looks like Shub-Niggurath trying to claw her way up her own gullet.
(Kudos to the visual artists on that one btw.)
But look at that thing and tell me whether it actually needs brain-magic when it has so many potentially interesting bodily features. Did you really exhaust the thematic gamut of invertebrate evolution so as to fall back on Mesmerism? Why not expand on metamorphosis by some kind of combat molting? Or giant termite heads planted as fortifications? Or maybe single-use bee stingers or cnidocytes? Stag beetle grapple attacks? Squid ink? Chromatophores? Octopus flexibility? Dragon fly nymph masks shooting out à la Alien? Vampiric health stealing via a tick hypostome? Units twinning with each other like mated schistosomes? Or here's a crazy idea, why not actually put in the effort to imagine what sort of technology a sentient space-bug species might create to go along with arthroponderous biology?
Of course the lazy, trite shortcut to science fantasy pathos termed "psi" was hardly invented by Triumph Studios. Some of the biggest names in SciFi have been guilty of it, including where it comes to insectoid aliens. Robert Heinlein assumed it's how his Starship Troopers bugs would be commanded and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (which owed a great deal to Heinlein's Troopers) expanded it to a central plot point. George R.R. Martin resorted to it for his own Sandkings. Hearkening back to Science Fiction's explosion in popularity as a genre at the previous turn of the century, Gustave Le Rouge had his swarms of Martian vampire squid-bats commanded by a mountain-sized brain and H.G. Wells, though he admirably did not fall back on the crutch of mentalism, helped cement this precept of an insect hive being mentally controlled through his Selenites' cephalomorphic grand leader in The First Men in the Moon.
It's hardly surprising that the copycat brigade at Blizzard Entertainment made telepathy a centerpoint of their Zerg, which is the source Planetfall most likely employed as one of its many unimaginative pulp SF crutches, alongside the Borg or Xenomorph infection. But Blizzard is the lowest common denominator, and you've got to set a higher bar for yourself than that! Giant psychic space bugs? It's been done. Done to death, for over a century now. Invertebrates can provide a hundred, a thousand different mind-bendingly inhuman features, tangible ones with materialistic explanations, around which an alien species might be based in lieu of the tired routine of space wizards with throbbing temples.
As a last point, the case of psychic bugs is even more annoying than most abuses of telepathic magic in "science" fiction. Superficially, it fits with the idea of a "hive" or "swarm" exhibiting stunningly complex meta-behavior, but in the real world of course social insects achieve such behavior by naturalistic means, which are consistently more impressive than if they all really did have radios in their heads. Whether it's buzzing, multi-spectral color markings, pheromones or Her Majesty's Bouncing All-Bee Ballet, please dream up some more interesting means of hive communication than dyeing your damage numbers Palantir Purple and calling it "psi!"
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