The Ware are a semi-sentient set of self-replicating equipment which has spread throughout the Alpha Quadrant and sucked several smaller species dry in its relentless lust for neural-organic interfaces.
Just gotta clarify -- the thing about the Ware is that it isn't even slightly sentient. It was created for customer service, but it had no comprehension of what that imperative meant, so it just blindly adapted itself to be more efficient at acting on its programming without understanding what that programming was
for, and thus it ended up harming people while acting on its instructions to serve them. It used people's brains as part of its system, but only for extra memory storage and raw processing power, not in a way that actually drew on their intelligence like the Borg did.
It gets worse when an Andorian crew is taken hostage by the Partnership, a Federation-like group of races which is utterly dependent on the Ware.
I'd also disagree with the characterization "taken hostage," which implies a terrorist or criminal act. They arrested the
Vol'Rala crew
as criminals and held them over for trial. The incident happened in Partnership territory and affected its citizens, so the Partnership was acting on its rightful law-enforcement authority.
I have to say I was really intrigued by the Partnership as it is a sci-fi concept I don't think I've actually encountered before which is really intriguing: races which don't evolve tool-building capacities but are fully sapient. That's kind of a horrifying concept for Star Trek because according to the Prime Directive, these races are never going to be able to move past their subsistence existence, let alone enter into space.
Well, not unless someone other than the Federation contacts and helps them. That's how the Choblik got to where they are -- an alien species uplifted them to full sentience and tool-using capability. Although there are hints of at least one non-technological species that participates in Starfleet -- the dolphins mentioned in the
TNG Tech Manual and "The Perfect Mate."
I do love the idea we Klingon coffee is actually something they made from regular coffee, though. That's the kind of interconnected universe I love.
I initially assumed that it was a separate thing that was just called "Klingon coffee" because of its similar nature. But I researched it and found some tie-in references to it being bred from Earth coffee beans into a stronger variant.
1. While it's easy to blame Corporate GreedTM for the Ware destroying the original race's civilization, I'd argue that you could also simply blame anti-intellectualism in general as they created something absolutely beautiful with capitalism--it only became a monster when they ceased to know how it worked. In other words, it's an argument against IP laws than corporations.
I'd call those connected ideas. People who want absolute power and control, whether corporations or governments, tend to want to suppress knowledge that would allow others to challenge their claims. Look at how the oil and coal-company puppets in the current US government are erasing all information about climate change from government sources.
4. Destroying the Partnership is certainly the darkest thing the Federation has ever been involved in as it basically annihilates a similar organization to itself.
Not unlike how, during the Cold War, the United States often helped foreign dictators crush democratic reform movements because the dictators were strongly anti-Soviet (e.g. the CIA overthrowing Mosaddeq in Iran and putting the brutal Shah back in power, which eventually provoked the fundamentalist revolution that put the Ayatollahs in power and made things worse for America in the long run).
5. I am very interested in how the ridgeless Klingons will apparently rise to power over the course of the next century. We see they don't have much of a sense of honor or fair play but really, how many Klingons DO?
I think it's more complicated than that. Certainly there's no sign of them in
Discovery. I think the departure from honor that got its start in LBTC eventually spread through the whole empire regardless of race, as it fell into conflict and disarray and a "by any means necessary" mentality took hold. We saw in
Discovery that T'Kuvma was trying to bring Kahless's teachings back to an Empire that he felt had lost sight of them, which meshes pretty well with the end of LBTC.
6. I feel doubly bad for the Andorian crew because if I get what the book is alluding to, they'll probably go down in Federation history very poorly.
Oh, I definitely think they redeemed themselves at the end. But what happened to them was tragic and controversial enough that it gave Starfleet a reason to want to avoid naming ships
Enterprise for a while, in any language. I think that's more out of respect for the losses than out of condemnation for the
Vol'Rala crew.
)
