How about a Borg series?

[woodstock]

There is a post on the General Trek Discussion about what the Borg do between assimilations; so would anyone be interested in a series focused on the Borg? (before and after Destiny) What do the authors on this site think?

 

[Christopher]

How could you do that? The Borg aren't characters. The Borg are one character. Every drone is a cell in a single collective mind, robbed of all autonomy and self-awareness. You can't tell much of a story about a single character, especially one with such a rigid thought process, driven by an instinctive need to expand and absorb. Really, the Collective is barely even a character -- it's more a force of nature, a cancer spreading across the galaxy, or at least it was until the Queen was retconned into existence as its face and voice.

That's why most every onscreen Borg story after the first one involved individuals who were taken as drones or liberated from being drones, or about the civilizations that fought the Borg or were destroyed by the Borg. Stories need to be about people, not impersonal entities, and so they had to work around the concept of the Borg in order to include characters in the narrative. Because, frankly, the Borg were not a great idea. They were a great idea for a single story, but the original concept was so dramatically limiting that they had to change it and work around it in order to get any more stories out of it. The only interesting stories are about the victims and survivors of the Borg, or the origins of the Borg. And all those types of stories have been told already.

 

[DonIago]

I'd add that in any Borg-based story, the Borg are not only almost certainly going to come off as the villains of the piece (possible exceptions including the Dominion and Species 8472) but are also going to win. They're also monolithic, so there's not really the option of having sympathetic members of a generally antagonistic race as you can with the Romulans/Cardassians/etc.

I'm just not sure what such a story, much less a series of stories, would involve.The only option that comes to mind as potentially interesting is the Borg perspective on situations we've already seen (a Borg telling of "Q Who" for instance), and I'm not sure there's much room for storytelling there.

 

[JD]

I could see a series dealing with the Borg but not focused on the Collective, maybe about Unimatrix Zero members, or Hugh's group, but that would probably just end up feeling like a massive repeat of what we got with Seven of Nine.

 

[Mage]

It would become boring very fast, I think. All they do basicly, is assimilate.

 

[somebuddyX]

I think it would be neat to see a short story about a single cube out on a mission against some foe, even if were simply the first contact from Q-Who, but from their point of view. I think it would be interesting to see how they adapt to things because I am still hazy on how that exactly works, but if it's the process of analysing and applying countermeasures within nanoseconds, slowing down the story to see that happen could be interesting, if likely very antiseptic. Without some kind of audience surrogate, I don't think this story would last very long but as part of a collection of unrelated short stories about various Borg from throughout the franchise, it could be interesting.
(I just noticed I used "interesting" about five hundred times in this one paragraph ffs)

 

[Mage]

I can't see how it's interesting from the Borg's point of view. There isn't any actual inner-dialogue going on, or dialogue between drones. Remember the opening for Voyager's 'Dark Frontier'? That would basicly be from the Borg's point of view.

 

[somebuddyX]

I'm thinking of like a scene in the First Contact novelisation where Picard "hears" the Borg and there is some kind of hive mind communication going on.

 

[DimesDan]

How boring, it's like doing a thunderstorm from the storms POV.

 

[somebuddyX]

That sounds like an awesome story!

 

[Christopher]

Let's be very, very careful not to make any specific plot suggestions. See the pinned thread at the top about story ideas.

 

[Jinn]

I could see a 'Last Days of [Insert Name of Species]' series chonicling the impending doom some random or known species, but that would get boring and depressing after some time.

 

[Steve Roby]

Look back at the Borg stories on TV. They're most effective when they're like a force of nature. But forces of nature tend not to be interesting protagonists. You wouldn't tell a story from a tidal wave's point of view.

 

[publiusr]

That's how it should be. I think of the Queen as a bit of an infection of the Borg. The idea of hauted machines, cenobites--I can see storylines where the Borg could go back to being the monolithic threat after facing some crisis or another.

 

[vegaslover62]

I think the thing is, everybody likes the Borg episodes, but the Borg were incredibly hard to write for by the professionals, and amateurs always write about the Borg because they want their stories to be that popular. But the amateurs always write about a militaristic Starfleet, doing things that are generally anathema to what Starfleet personnel would actually do. Somebody even approached me about co-authoring a story about the Borg and the Daleks. Two 2-dimensional villains in one story! I foresaw that it was going to be dreary and I never entertained any further thought.

 

[Christopher]

Somebody even approached me about co-authoring a story about the Borg and the Daleks. Two 2-dimensional villains in one story!

The Borg and the Daleks have something in common -- they both eventually added a more personalized lead figure (Davros for the Daleks, the Queen for the Borg) to give them a face and a voice and make it easier to tell new stories about them. See also the Replicators in Stargate, who started out as remorseless CGI robot bugs, but eventually evolved into a humanoid form so they could have dialogue and personalities. There are probably other examples.

 

[TwoJakes]

The story could focus on species in the delta quadrant who oppose and fight the Borg, something like the allies fighting the Nazis.

From what we've seen, while the Borg are powerful, they hardly unstoppable.

Resistance isn't futile.

 

[E-DUB]

"To seek out new life and new civilizations and, if they are worthy, assimilate them."

 

[20fridge]

Somebody even approached me about co-authoring a story about the Borg and the Daleks. Two 2-dimensional villains in one story! I foresaw that it was going to be dreary and I never entertained any further thought.

I once read a Borg and Cyberman team-up in a crossover comic. Honestly, that was the least interesting part of the crossover for the same reasons as a Dalek/Borg story. The only way it worked was as an excuse for The Doctor to team up with the crew of the Enterprise-D (and in flashback Kirk's crew). Without the hero team-up it would have been a magnificently dull story.

 

[Christopher]

From what we've seen, while the Borg are powerful, they hardly unstoppable.

They're stoppable if they're not particularly interested in you -- if you're a distant enough power that they only bother to send one cube, or if you're just a single ship that happens along while they're preoccupied with a bigger threat, or if they're deliberately letting your ship go unassimilated so they can study you and figure out how to assimilate your civilization better the next time around. But the Collective has millions of cubes and what's probably the largest territory of any single power in the galaxy, so if they ever decide to come at a civilization en masse, that civilization is over. (Unless something extraordinary happens, as seen in the Destiny trilogy.)