Re: Janeway returning to Trek Lit?
Either way, the supercube's actions in TNG: Resistance and TNG: Before Dishonor were not in retaliation for the "Endgame" attack.
The fact that those events were
completely unrelated to Destiny really weakens them, IMO. They don't serve as a build-up, they're just a separate crisis which happens to be with the same enemy.
I think it's safe to say that, for whatever reason, the two novels dealing with the supercube (
TNG: Resistance and
TNG: Before Dishonor) were not as creatively successful as everyone had hoped going into them. I think this is a function of the authors essentially wanting to try to do interesting Borg stories without bringing the Borg's characterization to its logical conclusion; they wanted to do the "Borg cube invades the Federation story and gets defeated" paradigm in a new and interesting way, but didn't want to acknowledge that, really, you can only do that a couple of times before the premise itself ceases to be dramatically interesting.
David Mack, in
this interview on YouTube, essentially argues that if you're going to bring the Borg into play in the novels, you introduce a dramatic necessity to wrap them up, to do the final resolution of the Borg as a story element, to have them behave in a manner that's the logical conclusion of how they behave in the past. It just ceased to make sense for the Borg to only be sending one cube at a time -- hence,
Resistance and
Before Dishonor portraying it as a lone cube cut off from the rest of the Collective. But, ultimately, that's not dramatically satisfying. The stakes had been raised from all the times the
Voyager and
Enterprise crews had defeated the Collective. To remain a dramatic enemy, the Borg needed to escalate the stakes, too. Hence, the Borg Invasion in
Destiny.
Not exactly hearsay when you are hearing the report from a reliable witness first hand, as in my case. I have personally spoken to one of the witnesses (actually I can contact at least two of them). This person is reliable and someone I trust.
No, that's still hearsay.
So to finally satisfy you and your doubts:
It was ME (the owner of the Bring Back Janeway Facebook group) who talked to David Mack at the book stand of German Trek lit at Fedcon XX in Dusseldorf 2011.
I'm grateful that Mr. Mack took the time to frankly answer my questions about Janeway's return. I have a different view on those things than David Mack has, of course, nevertheless we were able to manage a businesslike talk and listen to each other.
With me there was a friend of mine who took this photo of me with David Mack and another German Trek fan as well as the sales assistent of the book stand where I bought the Destiny trilogy which David Mack signed personally for me.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...22611826.55367.100000659584123&type=3&theater
I published a short report about my talk to David Mack on different Voy boards in English and German after Fedcon. So there is no secret about it.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Kathryn J.
Excellent, it is no longer hearsay -- now we have direct testimony.
Now, I have some thoughts on this. Bear with me.
Acknowledging that a character has a flaw and that this flaw might reasonably be depicted as leading them to a poor decision with a lethal consequence is not the same thing as saying the character "deserves" what happened to them, nor is it the same thing as saying you dislike the character.
I like Janeway, personally. But I also agree that she has an arrogant streak in her. That's her flaw. I don't think she was
fundamentally arrogant, but I think it was a part of her (just as it was with Picard and Kirk). Martin Luther once said, "Our greatest sin is our greatest strength," and I think that's true of her -- I think that most of the time, Janeway's arrogance was actually an asset. It takes
gumption to stand up to the Borg Collective, to the Q, to half the governments in the Delta Quadrant, in order to get her crew home. You'd damn well
want someone with some arrogance sitting in the center seat if you're facing down all these threats with only one starship.
But I also think that it's a reasonable creative choice to depict that arrogance as sometimes leading to poor decisions. Janeway herself acknowledged that sometimes her decisions were not perfect. And I don't think it's unreasonable to depict a poor decision as resulting in her death.
That's not saying she "deserves" it. That's just saying -- well, it happened. A poor decision was made stemming from a flaw in her character. That doesn't make her a bad person, it doesn't mean she "deserved" to die. It just means, sometimes that's how the cookie crumbles.
Now, I can see where what I just described -- thinking that Janeway has some arrogance to her; thinking this led to her making a poor decision; thinking it's plausible for a poor decision to lead to the character's death -- could be misinterpreted by someone else as me saying that I think Janeway is fundamentally arrogant, that I dislike the character, and that I think she deserved to die.
So, my question is:
Can you specify that David Mack meant that he thinks Janeway is a fundamentally arrogant character who deserved to die? Or is it possible that he viewed her death more as a tragic inevitability than something she "deserved?" Can you paraphrase what, specifically, he said, and can you say with confidence that he did not mean something else?
Another author has stated here on BBS that KJ's actions in Endgame were (in his opinion, but is a major one, so would seem to have influence) just as bad as those of (old) Admiral Janeway (whose actions were selfish and criminal).
Who? In what context was this said? Can you provide a link?
Also, at a 2011 convention at a panel re: KJ returning or not, one of the official moderators said as such,
Who? What did he/she say, exactly? What is "as such?"
But, tho I think such an idea at Pocket Books exists (after how KJ was treated in Before Dishonor for me it's not hard to),
I always find that argument interesting, because I think Kathryn Janeway comes across quite heroically in
Before Dishonor.
Yes, her hubris leads to her being captured and assimilated. But it's also what gives her the strength to overcome the Collective's conditioning and mind control and disrupt the supercube from within. Kathryn Janeway's mental resistance allows Starfleet to defeat the cube.
Yes, you read that correctly: Kathryn Janeway defeated the Borg supercube through
sheer force of willpower. C'mon. You gotta admit, that's pretty damn cool.
That saying, I also don't believe KJ was "responsible" for the Borg War, is too convenient an excuse to blame one person,
Exactly. Frankly, the Borg's attempt to exterminate the Federation was inevitable. If it hadn't been Janeway, then some other Federate would have figured out some way to defeat the Borg at some other engagement. Even if the Federation never initiated any particular attack, eventually the Borg Collective would have grown tired of its assimilation attempts failing and would have attempted mass extermination in reaction to
that.
Just because a writer has a character do something doesn't mean that they endorse that action. If so, you'd never have antagonists in fiction.
I don't agree with Janeway's decision, but I don't think the writers necessarily intended for me to do so, or that they themselves do.
I'd think episodes such as "Tuvix" are a clear indication that sometimes the point of an episode is to present a conundrum and encourage discussion, not necessarily advocate a particular viewpoint...though of course the characters themselves have to reach a decision.
All true. But I do think we're supposed to root for Captain Janeway -- not necessarily Future Janeway, but Captain Janeway -- in "Endgame."
Well, if the writers thought I was going to applaud the Voyager crew disregarding whatever potential good they might have wrought for the duration of their journey just to save Seven and Chakotay and Tuvok, they have another think coming.
Actually, let's not even get started on Seven and Chakotay...
The dumb thing is that, if the writers weren't intending to make it polarizing, all they would have had to do is paint the future in much darker tones to begin with. Create a situation where Voyager getting home early could have made a real difference.
Hm. I just amused myself with the thought of how interesting it might have been if it turned out that future Admiral Janeway was in fact not a future Janeway at all.
You may be interested in reading the short novel
Places of Exile from
Star Trek: Myriad Universes, by Christopher L. Bennett. It's about an alternate timeline where the
Voyager crew chose to stay in the Delta Quadrant rather than continue to the Federation.
We had seen many times before that the Borg Queen can easily come back from the dead. And we know that the Borg possess other ways to travel through space other than using the Transwarp network.
False. The transwarp network was definitively established to be the Collective's only means for traversing the galaxy at speeds significantly higher than conventional warp drive.
So Voyager destroying the Transwarp Network and killing the Queen wasn't a guarantee that they would end the Borg once and for all.
Except that Future Janeway didn't just "kill the Queen." She infected the entire Collective with a neurolytic pathogen designed to break down the structure of the Collective itself. This was based upon advanced 25th Century technology. So Captain Janeway had every reason to think such an attack would be successful; it is not her fault that the Borg proved more resilient than even the 25th Century Federation could have anticipated.
In all the years that the Federation knew about the Borg, the Borg only ever tried to assimilate Earth twice (before Endgame). Each time, they only sent one Cube, as opposed to the entire fleets that they sent against random Delta Quadrant races. As Endgame showed, the Borg could have sent a ship (or more) straight to the Sol system at Transwarp. Instead, both times the Borg attacked Earth they crossed a huge portion of the Federation at Warp, both times giving Starfleet warning of their approach and a chance to go on the defensive.
Actually, we don't know when the Borg transwarp conduit to the Federation core worlds was established. I think it's far more probable that they had only established it subsequent to the 2373 Borg incursion depicted in
Star Trek: First Contact.
After Star Trek: First Contact the Borg seemed to have lost all interest in assimilating Earth.
False. "Dark Frontier, Part II" established definitively that the Collective was actively attempting to develop new assimilation strategies for the Federation; specifically, they were working on delivering a sort of "nanoprobe virus" that could covertly assimilate Earth's population without sending an invading drone army. In fact, it makes sense to think that they would have only then established a transwarp conduit to the Sol system -- much easier to quickly and covertly deliver the nanoprobe virus that way than to hope a ship could evade detection across thousands of light-years of Federation space.