IDW to publish post-Nemesis TNG Borg story, possibly Destiny

[Christopher]

As JD says, Ira Steven Behr created Vash in TNG: "Captain's Holiday." Braga didn't begin his association with Trek until the following season.

[The Wormhole]

Due to illness I haven't been able to get out to buy this yet, but I have read the preview pages online and it certainly seems interesting.

[Sci]

Hando wrote:

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On the other hand who is to say that all Borg were eliminated. There may be some still around (some who were not around when Destiny happened). By the way, is this discussed somewhere?

Having there be any more Borg in the novelverse continuity post-Destiny would undermine the dramatic purpose and integrity of the Destiny trilogy.

[DarKush]

^
Thanks JD and Christopher for that info on Vash. I'm glad that Braga did include her in the first issue. It was nice to see her again and to think that Picard carried on a friendship with her beyond the show.

Now Sci, I agree with what you are saying about the integrity of the Destiny trilogy, but the Borg are too big a part of Trek to be wiped out forever. I think they will be back in the novels eventually. Granted there are many of us on the boards who groan about the Borg and feel they are overused, but along with the Klingons, the Borg are probably the second best known adversarial group for mainstream fans.

[Christopher]

^Yeah, but that's why it's good that we have other continuities going like IDW's and ST Online's. It's not like there's nowhere fans can go to see Borg stories.

[Sci]

DarKush wrote:

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Now Sci, I agree with what you are saying about the integrity of the Destiny trilogy, but the Borg are too big a part of Trek to be wiped out forever. I think they will be back in the novels eventually. Granted there are many of us on the boards who groan about the Borg and feel they are overused, but along with the Klingons, the Borg are probably the second best known adversarial group for mainstream fans.

I'm with Christopher. Fans looking for Borg stories can go to alternate continuities like the IDW comics. But I really hope they never come back to the novelverse; frankly, there's nowhere to go with them anymore. Their dramatic potential has been exhausted, and they've been given a brilliant send-off that frankly shouldn't be undermined or contradicted.

[indianatrekker26]

i just read it. Can't say i was too terribly impressed. Most of it felt like a rehash of the Scorpion 2 parter from Voyager. Not the greatest pacing either for this story.

[DarKush]

^
I felt more charitably about it than you did . There were some shades of Scorpion in the comic, which I didn't mind at all because Scorpion was one of my favorite VOY episodes. The comic did introduce a Species 8472-like species on steroids. However I'm hopeful that the new species will be handled better than Species 8472 was.

Sci,

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. While I do think there has been a lot done with the Borg already, but I'm not writing off that one or more novel writers in the future won't come up with some interesting new take on them. I did think that Destiny did a good job ending their story, if it winds up being the final story, but I just can't believe that their popularity or their ubiquity won't make some novel readers or writers-perhaps not many among us-want to see them again in the books.

[Christopher]

Personally I never thought the Borg were that great an idea. There was very little you could do with them story-wise; they were more a force of nature than a personified antagonist. That's why the series shifted to telling stories about liberated drones, and introduced the Queen to give them a face and voice. The original concept was just too limited. If you want big space battles and action, then sure, you can use them for that, which is why they're still around in ST:O. But as a source of story they're problematical. So they don't work as well in prose.

Recall that before the post-NEM TNG novels, the Borg were rarely seen in Trek Lit. The Borg were introduced on TV in 1989; Resistance and Before Dishonor were published in 2007. In between those, the only novels that really featured the Borg in a central role were Vendetta, The Return, and Engines of Destiny. There were a couple of stories about finding Borg ruins (Mission: Gamma -- Lesser Evil and Corps of Engineers: The Light), and eleven out of the total 211 stories in Strange New Worlds were Borg-related. Plus they made a cameo in The Siege and were implicitly referenced in Probe. That's three featured roles and a few sidebars in eighteen years. That's not a lot of prose. And there are reasons for that.

[USS Intrepid]

Downloaded the iPad version last night. Quick read but I enjoyed it.

[indianatrekker26]

i also read Star Trek #13, very very good read. I really hope this is more of the kind of storytelling IDW does with this book. I can't recommend this one enough, without spoiling anything since it just came out.

[DarKush]

Christopher wrote:

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Personally I never thought the Borg were that great an idea. There was very little you could do with them story-wise; they were more a force of nature than a personified antagonist. That's why the series shifted to telling stories about liberated drones, and introduced the Queen to give them a face and voice. The original concept was just too limited. If you want big space battles and action, then sure, you can use them for that, which is why they're still around in ST:O. But as a source of story they're problematical. So they don't work as well in prose.

Recall that before the post-NEM TNG novels, the Borg were rarely seen in Trek Lit. The Borg were introduced on TV in 1989; Resistance and Before Dishonor were published in 2007. In between those, the only novels that really featured the Borg in a central role were Vendetta, The Return, and Engines of Destiny. There were a couple of stories about finding Borg ruins (Mission: Gamma -- Lesser Evil and Corps of Engineers: The Light), and eleven out of the total 211 stories in Strange New Worlds were Borg-related. Plus they made a cameo in The Siege and were implicitly referenced in Probe. That's three featured roles and a few sidebars in eighteen years. That's not a lot of prose. And there are reasons for that.

I must admit that I find your disinterest in the Borg a bit off putting since you wrote a pretty good Borg-centric novel. That being said, I think the Borg work best in small doses and in a way precisely for some of the reasons you said. They are a force of nature. And I like seeing our heroes deal with something that unstoppable. A lot about the Trek characters is/can be revealed in every encounter they have with a foe like the Borg.

As for the Borg themselves I still find them pretty cool. I like the aesthetic. I like how the species is composed of some many other species, all adding their knowledge and skills to the whole of the collective. The anti-Federation Federation aspect of the Borg still makes them an interesting adversary.

[Christopher]

DarKush wrote:

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I must admit that I find your disinterest in the Borg a bit off putting since you wrote a pretty good Borg-centric novel.

But it wasn't really Borg-centric. The Borg per se had a fairly small presence in the book and were mostly a catalyst for events. It was more about ex-drones and how they were adapting (so to speak) to life after the Collective, and about the SF concept of the cluster entity, and especially about the developing arc of the TNG crew and the character-level aftermath of the events of previous books. Plus I threw in some stuff that filled in some of the gaps in what we know about the Borg, since I knew that would be my only chance to address those subjects.

That being said, I think the Borg work best in small doses and in a way precisely for some of the reasons you said. They are a force of nature. And I like seeing our heroes deal with something that unstoppable. A lot about the Trek characters is/can be revealed in every encounter they have with a foe like the Borg.

I don't know, I just don't see the need to return to the same well. If you've done one story about your heroes surviving a hurricane, you don't need to do another. You find a different insurmountable challenge to pit them against.

As for the Borg themselves I still find them pretty cool. I like the aesthetic.

Interesting. That's probably the part I hate the most. Even when it first appeared in 1987, I found it a laughably antiquated and crude portrayal of cyborgs. And by modern standards it's even more naive. We're already at the point where bionic implants or enhancements can be much smaller and sleeker than anything the Borg had stuck on them, and at the beginning of research to develop technology built out of organic cells and tissues, not to mention nanotechnology. Heck, it's increasingly starting to look as if nanotech and biotech are convergent fields -- eventually they'll be indistinguishable. A cyborg race wouldn't have to look human, but it wouldn't look like two separate things, flesh and machinery, randomly stuck together.

I like how the species is composed of some many other species, all adding their knowledge and skills to the whole of the collective. The anti-Federation Federation aspect of the Borg still makes them an interesting adversary.

It might if they were more personified, but they aren't even a race or a civilization. They're a cancer that can talk.

And I've never bought that whole "adding distinctiveness" line. They systematically strip their victims of everything that makes them distinctive, forcing everyone into a homogeneous mass that conforms to their preprogrammed priorities and imperatives. I'd call it hypocrisy if I didn't think that was overly anthropomorphic.

[JD]

Sci wrote:

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I'm with Christopher. Fans looking for Borg stories can go to alternate continuities like the IDW comics. But I really hope they never come back to the novelverse; frankly, there's nowhere to go with them anymore. Their dramatic potential has been exhausted, and they've been given a brilliant send-off that frankly shouldn't be undermined or contradicted.

I'm with Christopher and Sci on this one. I liked the Borg, but IMO I don't really see why they where they would need to come back. We've already gotten plenty of Borg stories, and I don't really think there is that much to do with them that wouldn't be repeating stories we've already gotten. Hell, things were already starting to get repetitive by the time Voyager ended.

[Edit_XYZ]

Bob Orci - TPTB regarding creating canon material - declared all tie-in material developed under his supervision canon (Countdown being specifically mentioned):
http://trekmovie.com/2012/07/17/excl...game-as-canon/

Meaning - Data revival is canon.
Active borg technology existing a few years down the line, in order to retrofit the Narada, is canon - which is incompatible with what we learned of Caeliar neutralized borg tech AKA the borg will come back.