The book made it pretty clear that Delcara was not El-Aurian, just a refugee they took in.
Before Dishonor?
- Thread starter john24
- Start date
^ What he said. And thanks for the name, I don't know why I couldn't remember it.
I think that Delcara certainly works better as someone who's not El-Aurian. Did Richard Arnold really demand that or was it PAD's idea?
Note to self: Get new copy of Vendetta when getting Before Dishonor. My old one's cover fell off. And it's at home somewhere.
I think that Delcara certainly works better as someone who's not El-Aurian. Did Richard Arnold really demand that or was it PAD's idea?
Note to self: Get new copy of Vendetta when getting Before Dishonor. My old one's cover fell off. And it's at home somewhere.
I'm fairly sure I remember this change was one of many Richard "suggested" to PAD's proposed novel. Of course, he also wanted PAD to remove the female Borg, since there "weren't any", but PAD and his editor argued the case on that point, and won.
Re Delcara and Guinan: the ST Office's point at the time was not to let any of the licensed tie-ins reveal too much about Guinan's people, and to leave the topic to the episode writers. Not much was known anyway: the mysterious Listeners weren't even named as El-Aurians until the DS9 episode "Rivals" (Martus Mazur) and, even then IIRC, Guinan herself wasn't announced as an El-Aurian until publicity material started to be distributed to promote "Generations".
(Unless you'd guessed that "Aurian" derived from "aural".)
To be fair to Arnold and Roddenberry, at that time, the concept of assimilation wasn't integral to the Borg yet. "Q Who" suggested that drones were incubated from an embryonic stage as drones and never had any other identity. BoBW showed Picard getting assimilated, but presented it as a change in Borg tactics. It was consistently stated that the Borg assimilated civilizations and technologies, with no interest in individuals. Even after Vendetta, in "I, Borg," Geordi was able to stand by safely while the Borg returned to retrieve Hugh, because the Borg weren't interested in individuals as a rule. The concept of assimilation as a normative process didn't come along onscreen until FC, where the Borg were reinterpreted into something more zombie/vampire-like, something that consumed people rather than disinterestedly running over them. And of course that was developed far further in VGR and became the accepted Borg paradigm from then on.
So Vendetta pretty much anticipated the idea of the Borg assimilating people as a pattern, but at the time, it hadn't been clearly established in canon. Strictly speaking, for all we knew, a normal Borg drone was an incubated body with no prior life. (Note that Hugh in "I, Borg" was a blank slate with no pre-Borg identity or knowledge.) So it stands to reason that such Borg would be neuter. Thus, while GR and Arnold's take on Reannon may seem bizarre in retrospect, it actually was consistent with a conservative interpretation of the existing Borg lore of the time.
Which would've been an incorrect guess, since IIRC it's from the Hebrew for "angel of light."
I don`t understand that logic: The Borg babies we have seen must be automatically genderless? My understanding has always been that gender is irrelevant to the Borg and that it is usually not obvious who is male or female not only because so much of their bodies is covered by technology but also the explanation in "Resistance" makes much more sense.
As in so many other cases, Richard Arnold`s meddling with written Star Trek was shown here as well to be narrow minded and counter productive.
As in so many other cases, Richard Arnold`s meddling with written Star Trek was shown here as well to be narrow minded and counter productive.
However, Richard's stand was that the tie-ins shouldn't do too much trail-blazing for a show, especially while it was still in production. Imagine if Paramount's licensing division allowed PAD to do a huge novel storyline about the existence of female Borg, and then the show itself decided to proclaim that all Borg babies were in fact genetically tampered with in a petri dish to be genderless. Then you'd be saying "Why didn't Richard put a stop to this?"
As Christopher mentioned, the Borgification of Picard, the Ferengi who became Vastator of Borg, and Reannon were rare events, extrapolated from what we knew from "The Best of Both Worlds", but which became commonplace (seemingly retroactively) by the time of "First Contact" and Seven of Nine.
My copy of "Before Dishonor" arrived today! Airfreight at Galaxy Bookshop, Sydney. They ordered heaps - and had a large pile of pre-orders, too.
Not "must be," but given the assumption at the time that Borg were "vat-grown" rather than assimilated, it is not inconsistent for Roddenberry and Arnold to have believed they would be sexless. (Gender is grammatical or behavioral; sex is biological.)
As we see the Borg today, yes. My point is that the concept of the Borg has evolved over time, and a lot of the assumptions we make about them now are based on stories that hadn't been written yet when the Vendetta situation occurred. I'm trying to give a historical perspective on how it would've appeared back then, to clarify why Roddenberry and Arnold's assertion was not as strange at the time as it seems today.
I'm not debating his policies in general. I'm just saying that this particular decision (which reportedly was Roddenberry's, with Arnold just passing it along), while indeeed conservative and restrictive, was not as arbitrary or bizarre as it looks to us today. At the time, the idea of a human woman assimilated to become a Borg years before Picard was a radical proposal, not a natural or obvious one.
Of course, I don't think the reasons were expressed in the most sensible way. Saying "there are no female Borg" does sound kind of arbitrary. If they'd phrased it as "there were no humans assimilated before Picard," then that probably wouldn't seem so silly in retrospect.
Considering there's a female Borg in "Q Who," the first Borg episode, I'd say "wrong" is the word, not "arbitrary."
But was she intended to be female? The Talosians (TOS), Metron (TOS) and Bynars (TNG) were all played by female actors and extras, but they were not necessarily female characters.
Some of the names of TNG Borg extras are only just now becoming known (as females) because the wardrobe tag details are getting described in the "It's a Wrap!" eBay auctions of Paramount costumes.
Right, but they cast only women for those parts, right? Just as they did with the J'naii in "Outcast." That's not the case with the Borg. It seems reasonable to me that if they're casting actors of both genders, they're creating characters of both genders, unless they're under so much makeup and prosthetics that you can't tell at all.
Some of us watching "Q Who" when it first aired (and many times since) noticed the female Borg drone onscreen without benefit of a wardrobe tag because she is recognizably a woman in a Borg costume. That whole "there are no female Borg" line sounded wrong the first time I heard it because I knew I'd already seen female Borg.
I'm with Steve here, Ian. I watched "Q Who" a lot recently -- in preparation for writing both Many Splendors and Q & A -- and you don't need a wardrobe tag to know that there was a female Borg drone there.
The directive was stupid and arbitrary, like many of Richard Arnold's decisions, particularly regarding Peter's work.
The directive was stupid and arbitrary, like many of Richard Arnold's decisions, particularly regarding Peter's work.
On the other hand, if you're trying to cast an "androgynous" species, it's not unreasonable to cast actors of both sexes rather than just one. (Although I agree that that particular Borg extra was recognizably female, so yes, the Roddenberry/Arnold dictum as phrased was rather strange to me when I heard it. I'm not even saying I agree with it, just that I can see what the thinking behind it probably was.)
And again, the word is "sexes," not "genders." When applied to people rather than words, "gender" refers to a cultural role. For instance, a man who cross-dresses adopts a female gender while still belonging to the male sex. Gender is mutable; sex is inherent. Our culture got into the habit of misusing the word "gender" as a euphemistic synonym for "sex" during a time when we were so prudish that we considered it immoral simply to mention the word, even when it was being used to refer to being physiologically male or female rather than to the act of sex. But we're long past that in most respects.
Picked my copy up today at BAM (they didn't have it on the shelf yesterday and even told me they weren't getting it, past experience told me otherwise.) B&N still didn't have it in when I called them this morning.
This will be the third TNG book I've read this week, on top of finishing Christopher's Titan novel and the new Drizzt book.. its been a SciFi/Fantasy week for sure. Next up, Richard Bachman's Blaze to spice things up a bit :P I had been falling behind on my plans to read a book a week this year, time for some serious catch up work.
This will be the third TNG book I've read this week, on top of finishing Christopher's Titan novel and the new Drizzt book.. its been a SciFi/Fantasy week for sure. Next up, Richard Bachman's Blaze to spice things up a bit :P I had been falling behind on my plans to read a book a week this year, time for some serious catch up work.
Depends where the viewer is looking, I guess.
(I'm betting she's not as, um, buxom as Jeri Ryan?) I never realized there were female extras in those scenes till I started noticing the pics turning up on Memory Alpha about a year ago. And again, more recently, with the auctions.Hey, I'm with you there. Richard was/is always so resolute - when he has an opinion on something there's no convincing him otherwise; when he was "in power", it was simply tough luck if your view on some aspect of ST differed from his. PAD's side of events, as presented in "But I Digress..." (PAD's old comics column, later collected as a trade paperback of articles), has many more bizarre examples of their clashes. I still mourn for PAD's, MWB's, Brad Ferguson's and Jean Lorrah's lost characters and storylines from that period.
^^We wouldn't have gotten most of the books we've gotten in the past decade or so, I'd say.
Similar threads
