Hope someone can help here. I'm aware that Christopher's Department of Temporal Investigations books go into detail about a large number of past Trek stories that involved time travel, but what do they have to say about the events of First Contact? Was that a case of past history being changed via the presense of the Borg in the 21st century, or was it always that way? I was thinking that, if history was changed, it could possibly account for stuff like the Federation possessing detailed knowledge of the Borg and their ships a while before TNG "Q Who?".
First Contact in the DTI novels
- Thread starter Noddy
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There doesn't need to be a temporal paradox to explain the seeming inconsistency about Borg knowledge prior to "Q Who." As Poul Anderson pointed out in his Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire series, a multiplanet interstellar community is so vast that there's no way any one person could be aware of all the available information about it. You may be informed and well-traveled and cosmopolitan, but there will still be planets within your own civilization that you've never even heard of. And when you're dealing with the knowledge of other, neighboring civilizations throughout the galaxy as well, there are bound to be even more things that a given individual has never heard of. (Remember how in "The Last Outpost," Picard had never heard of the Tkon Empire, even though he was later established as an expert in archaeology? While that was a continuity error, it's one that can easily be explained without resorting to history being changed. It's logical to conclude that there are so many ancient civilizations in the galaxy that Picard couldn't possibly know about every one that the Federation has ever discovered.)
True, the Borg thing is a bit more of a glitch, since the ship's computer in "Q Who" didn't seem to have any record of them. But I resist crying "history was changed!" every time there's a minor continuity hiccup in Trek, because there are hundreds of them and so that would get ridiculous. And I prefer to think that the body of aired canon represents a largely consistent timeline rather than several different ones. The intent of ENT's producers was that their show represented the events that led into TOS itself, not a separate timeline branching away from it. And that's my assumption as well.
Besides, we know from "Q Who" itself, as well as Generations, that Guinan and her people knew about the Borg and that they came to the Federation decades earlier. So it stands to reason that the El-Aurian refugees would've mentioned the Borg to someone. Even without the later temporal hijinks, it's illogical to assume the Borg were completely unknown when the very episode that introduced them tells us outright that one of the show's major characters has known about them all along.
So my take, which I actually did spell out in Watching the Clock, is that the Borg had been heard of prior to "Q Who," but only as a vague galactic legend that wasn't widely known beyond certain fringe regions of Federation space. Magnus Hansen's research of that legend was known to the Federation's scientific establishment, but probably not taken seriously, or given much attention relative to the vast amounts of other research that establishment must've been involved with. It's a big galaxy.
True, the Borg thing is a bit more of a glitch, since the ship's computer in "Q Who" didn't seem to have any record of them. But I resist crying "history was changed!" every time there's a minor continuity hiccup in Trek, because there are hundreds of them and so that would get ridiculous. And I prefer to think that the body of aired canon represents a largely consistent timeline rather than several different ones. The intent of ENT's producers was that their show represented the events that led into TOS itself, not a separate timeline branching away from it. And that's my assumption as well.
Besides, we know from "Q Who" itself, as well as Generations, that Guinan and her people knew about the Borg and that they came to the Federation decades earlier. So it stands to reason that the El-Aurian refugees would've mentioned the Borg to someone. Even without the later temporal hijinks, it's illogical to assume the Borg were completely unknown when the very episode that introduced them tells us outright that one of the show's major characters has known about them all along.
So my take, which I actually did spell out in Watching the Clock, is that the Borg had been heard of prior to "Q Who," but only as a vague galactic legend that wasn't widely known beyond certain fringe regions of Federation space. Magnus Hansen's research of that legend was known to the Federation's scientific establishment, but probably not taken seriously, or given much attention relative to the vast amounts of other research that establishment must've been involved with. It's a big galaxy.
Just curious, are you expecting a different answer to what has been discussed in your Gen Trek thread?
Just a random thought, but perhaps Starfleet's archives do have something which would have been of help, but due to their perhaps sensitive nature they weren't included with all the stuff saved locally on the Enterprise-D's computers. Had the Enterprise been in rage of Starfleet's data net and Picard used his level-10 clearance they may have gotten access to the Hansens mission profile and Archer's cyborg incident in some sort of "hostile cyborg incidents" file, but out in system J-25 they couldn't.Christopher said:
^Maybe, except that the E-D computer is supposed to be the biggest mobile computer in the known galaxy (per TNG: "11001001"). Perhaps it doesn't have all the knowledge in the Federation, but one would expect it to have all the available data about possible alien species, including lore and legends, since that's relevant to its missions.
I think Noddy would find his best answer from Voyager's "Relativity".
It doesn't matter how big the database is, if the data is incomplete or indexed incorrectly or the wrong context applied then you arn't necessarily going to get the answer even if its in there somewhere.
I've always put the Enterprise Borg thing down to a lack of context to the data. They were not recorded in the "ancient" Star Fleet database as Borg but as "dangerous cyborgs".
I've always put the Enterprise Borg thing down to a lack of context to the data. They were not recorded in the "ancient" Star Fleet database as Borg but as "dangerous cyborgs".
^Except that Magnus Hansen knew of them under the name "Borg" years before "Q Who" happened, and researched them under the auspices of the Federation Council on Exobiology, as seen in "Dark Frontier." So the name "Borg" should've been in Federation exobiology databases as the name of a hypothetical cyborg race.
Plus, again, if Guinan knew them as Borg, then presumably the other El-Aurian refugees did as well, and some of them must've mentioned the cyborgs that destroyed their world, even if it was too traumatic for others to talk about. Heck, that's probably where Magnus heard of them from.
Plus, again, if Guinan knew them as Borg, then presumably the other El-Aurian refugees did as well, and some of them must've mentioned the cyborgs that destroyed their world, even if it was too traumatic for others to talk about. Heck, that's probably where Magnus heard of them from.
I've joked in the past that maybe the archivists storing this data just used a variety of tags inconsistently and no one noticed.
I myself have noticed this problem with my blogging. Sometimes some subjects get assigned different tags for good reasons. And I'm only one person who's reasonably aware of what I've written and shared.
In the context of a vast interstellar civilization, who knows what's going on? Tags, incompatible file formats, separated databases ...
I myself have noticed this problem with my blogging. Sometimes some subjects get assigned different tags for good reasons. And I'm only one person who's reasonably aware of what I've written and shared.
In the context of a vast interstellar civilization, who knows what's going on? Tags, incompatible file formats, separated databases ...
Tying into this somewhat, the Lost Era novel Well of Souls has an El-Aurian ship's counselor aboard the Enterprise-C, whom has flashbacks to the Borg during the story. While it isn't entirely clear that he actually mentioned the Borg to representatives of the Federation, it's probable; at one point, he hopes that the Federation remains forever ignorant of them (around 29 years before System J-25 finally happens).
And as Christopher points out, yup -- for sure, some of the Lakul refugees would've talked about the Borg to Starfleet at some juncture. Starfleet certainly would've inquired into why the hell they were running, and exactly who they were running from, seeing as how it nearly cost them a major, expensive new starship (to say nothing of the presumed life of the most famous starship captain in history).
It's clear they never acted on the information in any meaningful way, but that's a whole other avenue of discussion.
So, if that person survived the battle at Narendra III and was captured by the Romulans thereafter, could the Tal Shiar have been able to extract that information - willingly or otherwise?
Perhaps, by the time of the Neutral Zone incidents by the end of TNG season 1, the RSE already had at least the beginnings of their own postulation as to who was deemed responsible.
(But then, I'm not sure how the Borg being responsible for that series of attacks would square with the later "first contact" at J-25. Was the cube at J-25 supposed to have been the same one that had been scooping up those NZ colonies, and also been the one to show up in The Best of Both Worlds?)
One thing I've been wondering about, Christopher: how was Magnus Hansen regarded in the Federation? Maybe I've the completely wrong impression of the Hansens, but they always seemed to me like the twenty fourth century equivalent of storm chasers. They were certainly knowledgeable about their area of study, but that doesn't mean their ideas were accepted by their colleagues. Given that they went off on their own to study the Borg, I'm inclined to think they were a laughingstock.
--Sran
I don't know about "laughingstock," given all the bizarre things that turn out to be true in the Trekverse, but their ideas hadn't yet gained acceptance.
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