And I ignore all of that too, fanon is the worst offender, at least trek lit is liscensed content and not just pulled out of people's butts. "Spock was the first vulcan in starfleet". Ugh, no he wasn't.
Until something happens canonically that contradicts it, I'm happy to accept it into my personal continuity. YMMV.
Honestly, if the Borg had maintained those idyllic dreamstates when drones weren't on duty, and not fought against them, Borg society could be a kind of utopia.
It maybe that the Borg did exist for 1000's of years, but they didn't start as the overpowering juggernaut that they were in Tng.. Maybe they started small, Started up on 1 planet, but didn't have any type of space ships, or only Slower than light.. since it seems they don't "Invent" stuff only "Assemilate" so maybe they go out into the universe but takes hundreds of years to get around.. find FTL capable speices, assimilate them, then they find another, then another.. then find 1 species that totally obliterates them back to the stone age, then they rise up again, accumalating knowledge and technology to the point not many can stand up to them. and the assimalate all they come across.. So maybe during the time of the Vauduar, that they maybe maintained a couple of systems, but were easily beaten back at that time..
WE ARE THE CANADIAN BORG. RESISTANCE WOULD BE IMPOLITE. PLEASE WAIT TO BE ASSIMILATED. (Pour l'assimilation en francais, veuillez appuyer sur le "2.")
The Borg Queen's statement to Data seems to indicate a long history of conquest: Maybe they were focusing all their efforts on the far side of the Delta Quadrant. Kor
The Borg being this terrifying force of evil, but when you're assimilated you find a Unimatrix Zero-ish paradise where any drones anywhere can communicate with any anywhere else and everyone's happy, would be one hell of a twist.
Then again, "long before you were created" could be, like, August 2322... Might be the Borg conquer planets everywhere, and nobody notices, just like nobody before Kirk had noticed that a God lived next door to Earth on one of the planets of Pollux. Might instead be the Borg assimilate planets everywhere, and then pack the Drones into Cubes, leaving empty Class M worlds free for taking. Assorted colonists scratch their heads for a while, then happily settle on the shores of yet another weirdly circular lake on yet another planet full of those. Timo Saloniemi
I really like the idea above that they are the, well, Cybermen of Star Trek: their emergence is inevitable, and happens multiple times on multiple locations, keeping the galaxy constantly supplied with cyborgs. Due to Trek things like time travel and the ability of all communications and computing networks of the galaxy to readily interact, there is just one Collective, even if it is a pulsating entity with multiple hearts and with parts of it constantly dying and being born. Might be it sometimes appears to disappear entirely, occasionally being "defeated" after it grows too visible and too audacious, but never being eradicated for good. If it happens to take over the entire galaxy, it soon withers and perhaps dies for no longer having anything new to assimilate, and it takes some times for the galaxy to recover and for new seeds for the Collective to sprout. But perhaps that has never happened yet? We do know the galaxy can die and then recover, as it did with the Slavers... Timo Saloniemi
Always like to think they were an experiment gone wrong in the fashion of Skynet. Scientists create implants to keep people connected and enhance their natural abilities, then the software takes over and the Borg start spreading like a virus.
I like their take on it, a big human screw up. But the humans were the catalyst, bloody, arrogant MACOS
I think we're witnessing the beginning of the borg now. Everyone is walking around with a link to the internet in their hands, very often not even aware of their surroundings as they do because they are connected to the collective. How long will it be before there's a smart phone implant? Then everyone will always be connected, and it can even monitor your health and call the ambulance before you realize you're having a heart attack or stroke. It's a good thing, and then everyone gets more and more interconnected with helpful tools built in and ....borgs.
I never got into Trek lit but I think if I did my attitude would be “If it’s good, it’s canon until contradicted”. I agree with the hope the Borg origin has nothing to do with humans.
I did read the David Mack books, and while I did enjoy them, I don't really like that idea of how the Borg could have begun, because it involves human involvement, and that just seems too...coincidental. Anyway, I always thought that the origin of the Borg was something very similar to the origin of the original Cybermen in Doctor Who. I think Valykrie and Shawnster are on the right track. We *already* have the beginnings of humans upgrading themselves with computerized cybernetic implants...from limbs to brain implants. And now we have Elon Musk's project to develop a brain implant that could connect to a phone and the internet in 10 years. And for almost a decade now we have had some scientists experimenting with putting "nano wires" in animal brains, and talking about something called the "World Wide Mind" (google it) were people can literally share uploaded and downloaded memories. And in Discovery and in the Kelvinverse Trek, we see crew members augmented with cybernetic implants. So likely, the Borg started out as a race - or group of races - who developed the same technology, and someone got the idea of perhaps connecting more than one person together into a collective consciousness...for whatever reason...maybe just as an "let's see what happens if we" experiment...and then something went wrong. It could have been an accident, it could have been on purpose. It could have been someone with a nefarious intent, trying to control other members of their species...or by someone's misguided attempt at creating a unified peaceful utopia. It could have been done as a survival strategy (like the first Cybermen trying to survive the death of their world). It could just have been a glitch or a rogue mutated computer virus or a hacker with bad intent. It could have been done on purpose to make better soldier to fight a war. Or to just make better space explorers. Why or how ever it happened, someone from a race that already used cybernetic enhancements on their minds and their bodies, decided to experiment with making a collective consciousness...for good or evil. And somehow this collective consciousness got out of control and became the Borg. Though I think that the Borg's drive to assimilate may be a perverted version of the drive that the Federation has to learn and explore and absorb new members into the Federation. Kinda similar to how V'Ger's drive to learn and explore drove it to "storing" who worlds into it's "matrix" or whatever.* Perhaps the Borg started out as some version of Von Nieuman machine that incorporated an organic component, meant to explore and learn...and it...mutated and became the Borg, and it's drive to make copies and learn and upgrade got out of control...? *(I don't know if V'Ger downright assimilated/uploaded them or not, but it is strongly implied. But I don't think that the Machine Planet's civilization that upgraded Voyager 6 was the same as the Borg's civilization, because if the Bord had found Voyager 6 floating in space, they would have either ignored it as useless old tech...or they would have assimilated it into their own collective. I think. Either way, I would STILL love to revisit and explore that Machine Planet's society sometime...they are at least a Type 1 or 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale...)