Borg
- Thread starter James Wright
- Start date
As much as I dislike Borg stories myself, I wrote one, while taking a short story workshop class a few years ago. I called it, "The Gray People," and it was a Borg origin story that postulated a connection with V'GER and Nomad. Jackson Roykirk was a character in the story.
Go figure: the only other ST story I wrote in four semesters of that class was a Man Trap sequel (in which Captain Sulu takes the Craters' son back to M113 on a research mission), and I find the Salt Vampire even more loathsome than I find the Borg.
Go figure: the only other ST story I wrote in four semesters of that class was a Man Trap sequel (in which Captain Sulu takes the Craters' son back to M113 on a research mission), and I find the Salt Vampire even more loathsome than I find the Borg.
Oh, man! That would seriously suck a whole lot.
Canon means a recognized body of work - the stuff we see on screen is on-screen canon, books are a book canon, comics are a comics canon, etc...
^Well, no. Canon means a core body of work, as distinct from derivative works based on it. If the core body of a series is in books, then it has a book canon, but if the original work is on TV/film and the books and/or comics are only licensed tie-ins, then they are not part of the canon by definition -- unless it's something like Babylon 5 or Buffy Season 8 where the original creator is directly supervising them, in which case they're provisional canon until the creator does more TV/film and decides to ignore them.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
On-screen material is warched/known by a lot more people than those who read the tie-in literature, play the tie-in games, etc.
That's why on-screen material is considered canon (as "authentic" as fictional universes get) and tie-in products, not.
That's why on-screen material is considered canon (as "authentic" as fictional universes get) and tie-in products, not.
A core body is just the most common definition of which body is considered a canon - most canons don't have spinoffs, so they don't have a problem.
Besides, if, say, a young person who grew up with Enterprise as his first TV experience of Trek, then it's entirely possible that his core canon of the other generations is a set of novels or comics or games...
(There's also the problem that canon is a subjective thing, different for each person).
As an example, there are a number of posters on various fora who grew up discovering Dr Who via the books and audios, and who consider those their core canon, and the new series a spinoff...
Canon is subjective, unless the creator or some governing person says "this is it" (Lucas, Conan Doyle, etc) - the size of the audience is irrelevant either way.
Obviously there's a different matter in written fiction, where one author alone has created and nurtured the thing (e.g. Conan Doyle's Holmes or Ian Fleming's Bond) in which case the body written by that author is the canon (the phrase was, after, invented in its modern sense to cover the Holmes stories) and the rest isn't.
Not that this makes things easier when the original author de-canonises some of his own stuff, declares other contributions canonical (e.g. Lovecraft) or is wildly inconsistent with his own continuity (Fleming)
Err, no, it isn't. That's a misunderstanding of what the word means. The term "canon" comes from the church, where it referred to those writings that were officially recognized as holy gospel by the church authority. As opposed to apocrypha, writings that various individuals may subjectively consider holy but that the canonical authority does not recognize. The very word "canon" means something that has the official sanction of the authority in charge. "Personal canon" is a contradiction in terms. An individual may personally believe that a given tie-in is part of their own version of the Trek "reality," but if the powers in charge of Trek don't agree, that makes it apocrypha, not canon. A lot of fans use the word "canon" to mean "What I want to believe is real," but as I often say, that's like describing your personal tastes in food as USDA regulations. It's simply a misuse of vocabulary.
You're presupposing that there is a canonical authority who states what is and is not canon- this is sometimes the case, but as often not.
In terms of religion, you've then got a whole mess of schisms over who accepts which authority to determine canon. (In Trek terms, that'd be your pure Roddenberryites versus the Church of CBS versus the Followers of Desilu, vs the Tie-in Taoists, vs...)
And then there's the whole debate on how much weight is given to authorial intent...
I'll skip the USDA strawman.
Well, we're talking about Star Trek here, aren't we? In that case, there's a clear canonical authority, the studio that owns and produces the franchise.
Then we just need them to post a statement on the forum...
the writers can't agree on what's canon
The writers have debated the definition of the concept of canon...
Casey, cool your jets. I didn't ask to be corrected, and I certainly didn't ask for you to go off half-cocked. Don't make a big deal out of a "no big deal."
I'm actually feeling pretty calm, but that's always good advice, so I'll try to cool my jets.
That was my point, though - rhetorical or not, whether you're "asking to be corrected" or not, sometimes it happens if you say something that's not entirely accurate (or even just that someone else thinks isn't entirely accurate). I feel fully cocked on that matter. (Possibly in more ways than one, if you feel I'm acting like one . . .)
Like you and I both have said, though, no big thing. I'm sorry if you take offense at my statement.
Casey, I personally have no idea what your problem is, but if Mr. Bennett needed to defend himself, I'm pretty sure he can do it with no unsolicited help from the likes of you. He corrected me, I corrected him. Why you think he needed help, especially with your crappy attitude, is beyond me.
Given your reaction, I agree that I should have stayed out of it. I didn't think you would react like this. I have no problem with you - as far as I'm concerned, we cool. My bad and all that.
Back on topic? While I think it would be a big mistake for Abrams & Gang to make a movie with the Borg as the protagonists, I actually think it would be very interesting to see a Myriad Universes story about the TOS crew encountering the Borg. Not so much stories with hints of Borg influence, which we've seen smatterings of, but a full-on first contact story with Kirk and the original crew combating an assimilation attempt. Granted, it might not end well for the Enterprise crew, but that's one benefit of What If? stories - no need for a happy ending.
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