Petition for a return of the "Q Who" - Borg in the Novels!

[trampledamage]

I can't help but feel that the "faceless hivemind is too limited" theory is really just an argument from lack of imagination.

You're starting to stray into ad hominems with those last two paragraphs, Crazy Eddie, considering that one of the people in the debate is someone that actively works as a writer in Star Trek. It's been a pretty calm debate so far, and I apologize to the mods if this is backseat modding, but please don't turn to personal insults.

I agree with Idran, don't let this discussion go down the road of insults.

Also, Crazy Eddie, pay attention to your audience- the one thing you can't accuse the Trek Lit forum goers of is lack of imagination

 

[Christopher]

The problem isn't lack of imagination; the problem is that professional writers have to do more than just say "I imagine that this is possible." They have to make it work. And when imagination meets reality -- the reality of creating a well-structured, effective story that's marketable at a professional level -- there's a process of natural selection that kicks in. It's easy to come up with ideas, but as with evolution, some attributes are more successful than others.

The evolutionary metaphor is particularly fitting here, because we're talking about ideas that can spawn multiple stories -- that can "reproduce" and "propagate" -- versus ideas that really only work for one story, or that don't work at all. An idea that works best in a single story isn't a bad idea per se, just not one well-suited for ongoing serial fiction. As with natural selection, different needs favor different attributes. There are some ideas that are terrific for a novel or a movie or another one-shot story, but that don't work so well when stretched out as an ongoing series. Because ongoing stories have certain specific needs that are different from the needs of a one-shot story.

So it's not that the professional writers for Star Trek, Stargate, and all the other series that have humanized faceless recurring villains lack imagination; it's that they also have experience -- the experience to know which of the ideas they can imagine are better suited for continuing stories and which ones are better for standalone stories.