ARRRRRGH!! Somebody just spoil Resistance for me! (spoilers)
- Thread starter Semah
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The stupid plan works.
And...
Sarah Nave (sic?) and the Italian-sounding last name security guy die. You don't miss much.
Did we read the same book?
Picard's 'stupid plan' is a failure: his attempt to pose as Locutus is exposed in short order by the Queen and he is captured. Worf, ignoring Picard's order to bugger the Enterprise out of there, contacts Janeway for permission to cloak the ship, which he does after LaForge promptly manufactures and installs the cloaking device (presto, chango!). Since these 'frightening and aggressive' new Borg have apparently no notion of cloaking or even basic shields, Worf and Crusher lead away teams wherein during a running battle with the drones Crusher is able to get her hormone-killing concoction to the Queen, at which point she turns back into a sexless drone and the matriarchal Collective collapses. Picard is then rescued.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
I recommend that you get Q&A and Greater than the Sum as well. Q&A is one of the best of the post Nemesis fiction and the last chapters of Greater than the Sum lead directly into Destiny.
As for Before Dishonor, well I think (personally) it's one of the the worst pieces of fiction ever written - but that's beside the point. I hope you enjoy it.
Edit: For the benefit of the OP, there are SPOILERS below for the rest of the TNG relaunch.
If I'm wrong about this, please correct me, but was this plan in Resistance of injecting the Queen with testosterone (or whatever the heck it was), not supposed to result in the end of the Queen forever? Wasn't that why the Borg adopted Janeway as their Queen in Before Dishonor? Yet she's back again in Destiny (and I don't recall about Greater Than the Sum). I'm sure if this was the case some sort of explanation would have been given. It's been a while so maybe I'm way off base. I've just read so many Borg stories recently it had been getting hard to keep all the details straight.
It seems someone at the drawing board was absolutely determined to tell the ultimate Borg story and (while this may not be the case), it came across to me that Before Dishonor was originally supposed to be that story, what with many major characters from several series, the fate of Janeway, and let's not forget the planet-eating, and Resistance was to be a part of the preparation for that. But it seems that it was felt that this was insufficient so Destiny was thought up and Greater Than the Sum (while an individual story in its own right) was now a bit of a lead in to that story. I don't mean this to be disrespectful to any of these novels or their authors as I did enjoy them all. It just seems like the coherence between the stories could have been a bit better.
If I'm wrong about this, please correct me, but was this plan in Resistance of injecting the Queen with testosterone (or whatever the heck it was), not supposed to result in the end of the Queen forever? Wasn't that why the Borg adopted Janeway as their Queen in Before Dishonor? Yet she's back again in Destiny (and I don't recall about Greater Than the Sum). I'm sure if this was the case some sort of explanation would have been given. It's been a while so maybe I'm way off base. I've just read so many Borg stories recently it had been getting hard to keep all the details straight.
It seems someone at the drawing board was absolutely determined to tell the ultimate Borg story and (while this may not be the case), it came across to me that Before Dishonor was originally supposed to be that story, what with many major characters from several series, the fate of Janeway, and let's not forget the planet-eating, and Resistance was to be a part of the preparation for that. But it seems that it was felt that this was insufficient so Destiny was thought up and Greater Than the Sum (while an individual story in its own right) was now a bit of a lead in to that story. I don't mean this to be disrespectful to any of these novels or their authors as I did enjoy them all. It just seems like the coherence between the stories could have been a bit better.
I haven't read Resistance, but it was thoroughly established in Before Dishonor, Greater Than the Sum, and Destiny that the Borg supercube seen in Resistance and Before Dishonor was not in contact with the rest of the Collective -- it was, in essence, its own mini-Collective that was going to grow and then get itself back in touch with the rest of the Collective in the DQ.
David Mack has made it clear that the idea of bringing the Borg back was his notion, and that he did that because he felt that if they'd brought the Borg back to the table in the previous TNG novels, they needed to do a story that would deal with them once and for all.
Well, I read it over a year ago.
Only in the sense that it was presumed to give Starfleet a weapon that they could subsequently use to prevent the formation of new Borg Queens, thus allowing them (in theory) to neutralize the Borg as a threat in the future. Although as they learned in GTTS, it wasn't as easy to do that as they allowed themselves to believe at first.
The particular isolated Borg supercube seen in RES/BD, which was cut off from the rest of the Collective by the destruction of the transwarp hub in "Endgame," therefore needed to create its own Queen in order to function effectively. As a population of androgynous, incubated drones, these Borg needed to use the "royal jelly" formulation depicted in RES to "feminize" a drone so it could become a Queen. After RES, Starfleet removed all the drones from the supercube, so there were no drones left to create a new Queen out of. So the remaining inorganic half of the Borg consciousness -- i.e. the "empty" supercube -- needed to assimilate a new humanoid body, namely Janeway's, to use as the host for the Queen consciousness.
The Einstein Borg in GTTS are an offshoot of those assimilated by the "evolved" supercube of BD. The Janeway Queen implanted them with enough of the Royal Protocol (the Queen software) that they could operate semi-autonomously, without needing a Queen.
But these were, again, the last remnants of the isolated population of Borg that was threatening Starfleet through much of 2380. The Borg from Destiny were the main population of Borg from the Delta Quadrant, a separate group with their own Queen.
GTTS was never not a lead-in to Destiny. I wasn't even invited to do the book until after Dave had written the outline to the trilogy, and my specific assignment was to bridge the gap between BD and DES, to tie up the remaining loose ends from prior TNG-R novels and set up the board for the trilogy.
I'm also pretty sure that Dave must've been working on the DES outline at the same time that the earlier TNG-R books were being written. So I think it would be incorrect to call it something that was thought up later than the rest.
Well, I read it over a year ago.
Oh. We've just been having so many interpretative differences, I assumed this was going to be another. Sorry if I came off harsh.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
No sweat. This old brain just failed to retain the specifics of the book's third act. I just remembered they went aboard the cube and ultimately disabled it.Well, I read it over a year ago.
Oh. We've just been having so many interpretative differences, I assumed this was going to be another. Sorry if I came off harsh.
Plus, my short blunt answer was funnier.
No sweat. This old brain just failed to retain the specifics of the book's third act. I just remembered they went aboard the cube and ultimately disabled it.Well, I read it over a year ago.
Oh. We've just been having so many interpretative differences, I assumed this was going to be another. Sorry if I came off harsh.
Plus, my short blunt answer was funnier.
Agreed.
Would have saved time, too.
Finally got round to reading Resistance recently, after having read Before Dishonour and Q&A (yes, I did them back to front). Not read GTTS or Destiny yet. So I feel partially qualified to put forth my two-penn'orth.
Yeah, I didn't quite grasp how they got there in the first place. If the transwarp hub was destroyed in "Endgame," and the only ship to get through it prior was the Queen's Ship, which was destroyed, then where did these guys come from? Is that something from VOY: Homecoming that I missed?
Didn't really like that either. I do not like the idea that the drones are androgynous. I know it's based on Q's line way back in "Q Who?", to wit, "Not a he, not a she." But I never saw the Borg as actually not having gender, just that gender was irrelevant. What would be the point of them removing all traces of gender from the DNA of every single life-form they encounter and assimilate? It just becomes irrelevant in the new drone's life, that's all. So to say that a "feminizing" compound was required to create a queen was based on a flawed premise, IMO. I realize it's based on the insect paradigm, but insects aren't born as gendered life-forms to begin with before having it removed.
Clearly and succinctly explained, thank you.
There are Borg all over the galaxy; it's just that most of them are in the Delta Quadrant. Keep in mind that the first few Borg encounters were all with isolated cubes that were way, way beyond their home territory. If the Borg would send isolated cubes to sample worlds along the Romulan border or attack the Federation, they've probably sent other isolated cubes or small fleets of cubes to other far-flung reaches of the galaxy. (For instance, we know from Mission Gamma: Lesser Evil that at least one Borg cube reached the Gamma Quadrant.) And those long-range expeditionary forces or offshoot populations would've been cut off from "home" when the transwarp hub was trashed.
The 2380 supercube (let's call it) was no doubt somewhere near Federation space already when the transwarp hub collapsed. It was adrift for a couple of years without the Queen's guidance, but then eventually started growing a new Queen, and then Resistance happened, and things went from there.
I believe that was addressed through GttS, and someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, with the explanation being that it wasn't so much that the Borg removed the gender from their assimilated drones but that they took genetic material from those they'd assimilated and then created their own separate drones from that - which then came to explain that the Borg we saw on TNG were these androgynous, Collective-created drones, but many of them were destroyed during the conflict with Species 8472, which is why the assimilated drones, became so numerous, giving the make-up differences between the TNG Borg from what we saw in First Contact and Voyager an in-universe explanation.
Or is it just that all the Borg stuff has begun to run together in my mind?
No, you're remembering correctly. GTTS established that the Borg have two types of drones: Drones grown by the Collective itself, which are usually grown neuter, and drones assimilated from the Collective's victims. When the Federation first encountered the Borg in the 2360s, the majority of the Collective's drones were neuter, but most of them were killed during the war with Species 8472. The Collective moved to quickly replenish its numbers by engaging in an aggressive campaign of assimilations, causing the majority of drones to become natural-born, assimilated victims.
Something occurs just now: if the Borg required a female to enact the Royal Protocol, and had the capacity to grow their own drones, why not grow them all female such that all could become potential queens instead of having to rely on having an assimilated drone of the correct sex on hand? Granted, the circumstances that led to Resistance were extreme, but on the other hand, I don't see why the Borg wouldn't have this redundancy since I can't think of any reason why neuter drones would be preferable or less resource-intensive (don't we all start off female, such that neutering would be a deliberate program on the part of the Borg?)
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
I suppose it might be an ideological thing. Gender implies sexuality, which implies the ability to feel love and, therefore, loyalties to anything other than the Collective. Who said the Borg were always going to behave rationally?
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