I might have missed this during my marathon read of the Destiny trilogy and the subsequent, A Singular Destiny. I'm now midway though Full Circle and I still have no answer. Why did the Borg stop their aeons long tradition of assimilation in favor of speedy relentless genocide? (If the answer is in Full Circle and I just haven't got to that part don't spoil me, otherwise fill me in!) Was it the Borg's intention to forever give up assimilation or was this total change of MO just about humanity?
Full Circle perhaps elaborates on it from Seven of Nine's perspective, but if you've read the Destiny trilogy, then you know that the Caeliar assimilated the Borg. There are no more Borg. Though I'm sure the Borg will return in some form later. They are too profitable and well known a Trek adversary to leave alone, like the Klingons. Perhaps not in literature but in the new Trek films.
Basically, after fifteen years of the Federation being an increasing irritant, the Borg had enough. If the Borg couldn't assimilate the Federation, it was more efficient to exterminate the Feds and their allies. Humanity was simply too dangerous to let live.
Greater Than the Sum and Destiny I both established that it was Voyager's return, and built on something that VOY established about the Borg in "Mortal Coil" -- that the Borg will sometimes reject a species for assimilation and deem them a detraction from perfection. Basically, when Voyager destroyed the Transwarp Hub network, they destroyed the entire Collective's ability to use transwarp drive, period, throughout the entire galaxy. This was such a major blow to the Collective that they decided that the Federation was no longer a minor irritant, but a genuine threat -- one so great that its existence and those of its allies could no longer be tolerated. They determined that the Federation and allied species should be deemed detractions from perfection and all of them exterminated, post haste, driven to extinction before they hurt the Collective even further. Upon exterminating the Federation and its primary allies, the Klingons, the Borg then intended to use Federation space as a rallying point from which to subjugate all of the known Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Originally, the Collective anticipated reaching Federation space via regular warp drive. It was only after they stumbled upon the subspace tunnels that led to the Azure Nebula that the Collective hit upon the idea of using it to step up the timeframe for its invasion.
I haven't read the books since they first came out so I might have just forgotten this, but how did the Borg first stumble across the tunnels?
...and the Borg first announced their altered modus operandi to the Federation back in Resistance, and followed-up on it in Before Dishonor.
Different set of Borg. That was a branch of the Collective that had been cut off from the rest of the Collective; as such, it arrived at its modus operandi independently of the main Collective, which only adopted that new behavior towards the UFP and its allies (not uniformly, as the Supercube branch did).
^Right. As Resistance explained, those Borg were in "kill" mode rather than "assimilate" mode because they were defending a nascent Queen.
Ah, this is the tricky bit. Logically, yes, but "Endgame" was rather inconsistant in this regard, sadly. The episode explicitly told us there were six hubs, and yet the crew continually acted as if destroying only the one would cripple the entire network. I suppose the Borg are a collective, though; maybe this once again proved their weakness. Maybe the neurolytic pathogen disabled some fail-safe that kept the hub controls from interacting with those in other unimatrices controlling other hubs...or maybe I'm spouting babble here? Anyway, the authors of the novels have followed "Endgame's" lead in portraying the entire network as gone, as this is what was explicitly portrayed on screen.
The way I look at it is that the destroyed hub was the only one that led to the part of the galaxy occupied by the Federation and its neighbors, so as far as Trek storytelling is concerned, the other five hubs are irrelevant (pardon the expression).
I was under the impression that the novels were proceeding on the assumption that knocking out that one transwarp hub caused some sort of chain reaction that either destroyed or disabled all of the other transwarp hubs and which collapsed all of the transwarp tunnels that the Borg transwarp coils had been used to access, thereby ending transwarp capability for all Borg vessels throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.
^I don't know if the novels ever clarified that. But under my interpretation, it doesn't matter to the narrative whether that happened or not. That's the beauty of it.
I would have to dig out my old VHS tape of "Endgame", but IIRC the stellar cartography map shown during the transwarp hub battle plan sequence showed multiple hubs with multiple endpoints throughout the Milky Way galaxy, so I have to lean towards the accepted explanation that the neurolytic pathogen deployed by Admiral Janeway initiated a cascade reaction that caused the other five hubs to also self-destruct. Maybe someone with the DVD would like to put up a screenshot? Still doesn't answer the question of how the Borg found the subspace tunnel they used to emerge in the Azure Nebula...
Well, we know that the Borg had already sent their fleet of 7,000 ships to start warping towards Federation space in what was probably likely to be a 70-something-year journey, if I recall correctly. I would just assume that the Borg were keeping an eye out for advanced propulsion possibilities like wormholes and stumbled upon the subspace tunnels.
I took a look at the map while researching Greater Than the Sum, and it was too vague and inconsistent with the dialogue to be taken as anything other than impressionistic. Here's a screencap. Heck, that doesn't even look like our galaxy. And none of those highlighted dots corresponds to Voyager's position at the time of "Endgame," which would've been right alongside the galaxy's central bulge. After all, viewscreen graphics aren't actual sources of detailed and accurate information, they're just something put together to give a visual impression to a television viewer during the few seconds they're onscreen. The Borg had an immense territory spanning much of the galaxy and were instantly aware of anything that any drone encountered within that territory. Statistically speaking, that would add up to a higher probability of discovering any given thing.
Thanks for the screencap...not to nitpick, but are you suggesting that viewscreen graphics aren't (...opening big can of worms) "canon"? Regarding the Borg finding the subspace tunnel, was that covered in Destiny, or one of the run-ups to Destiny?
^"Canon" doesn't mean "accurate in every tiny detail." A lot of people have heard "Nothing offscreen is canonical" and jumped to the conclusion that it means "absolutely everything onscreen is canonical," but that's an elementary logical fallacy. Just because nothing off Earth is Canadian territory doesn't mean that everything on Earth is Canadian territory. Just because nothing outside a human body is a pancreas doesn't mean that everything inside a human body is a pancreas. (Well, there are probably lots of pancreases in other animals' bodies, in medical labs, etc., but you get the idea.) A canon is the core body of a fictional work. It's frankly rather absurd to treat a fictional creation as though every single detail within it could be treated as though it were as real and consistent and meaningful as something in reality. A canon is something that a person or a group of people makes up as they go along. They insert material that is meant to give an impression to the audience. It's not a genuinely consistent reality, it's just something trying to create the illusion of one. "Canon" is not defined by exact details, because every long-running canon contains errors, contradictions, oversights, and flaws. Canon is the big picture, and when details don't fit the big picture or don't make sense (like a character's face and voice changing because the actor was recast, or the same blinky-light prop showing up on twenty different unrelated planets, or a graphic depicting things that blatantly contradict known facts or spoken dialogue), then it's the big picture that takes priority.