The idea that the Borg have cube-shaped, redundant ships is because you can stick eight cubes together to make an even bigger cube (or split one cube up into eight smaller ones) will forever be part of my "headcanon."
Shatnerverse (TOS/TNG): The Return by William Shatner (and the Reeves-Stevens) Review Thread
- Thread starter youngtrek
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Well, the whole original idea established in "Q Who" was that Borg ships were completely undifferentiated, that they didn't have distinct engines or computer cores or anything like that because it was all uniformly distributed throughout them (although Voyager frequently ignored this and gave Borg ships singular components like vinculums and transwarp coils). So in that case, it stands to reason that the cubes could be combined or subdivided into vessels of a wide range of sizes, since even a small part of one would have all the systems of a larger one.
Yes, exactly.
Peak Borg will always be Before Dishonor, when the Borg cube did a Rubix cube thing.
The Borg maintaining a base inside subspace, in the shape of a tesseract was a neat detail that has always stuck with me. Other notable details include the Federation colony near the galactic core, and the non-humanoid Borg drone models (the constructor unit, the multi-person humanoid centipede, and the dog).
That was my favorite part of Star Trek: Armada 2—you could combine 8 Borg cubes into a Fusion Cube. Or even better, you could do it with Tactical Cubes and make a Tactical Fusion Cube.
Yes. Another interesting parallel between Picard Season 3 and "The Return".
I did wonder if it might be ever so slightly inspired by that. I loved that moment in the book.
That was very cool. I also like how they explain the Queen been able to escape the cube in 'The Best of Both Worlds' by using a type of transwarp transporter.
I've seen people mock the climax as deus ex machina, but I shrugged at the notion of a forgotten physical weakness like the one on the first Borg world.
After all, to quote Seven of Nine, early Borg history is fragmented. They probably forgot about it and figured that, whatever it was, it was too well-guarded to be a realistic security concern. Yeah, makes sense to me, you know?
I quite like "The Return." I didn't realise it was a sequel to "Ashes of Eden" because I read them out of order, and now almost 30 years later my dad's done the same thing. I really like this depiction of the Borg and assimilation being much slower and more like body augmentation than the virus thing of "First Contact." And you actually see some city I think get carved up and tractor beamed into space like what was alluded to in Jouret IV and System J-25. There were a bunch of little moments that I love, like the Monitor/Enterprise and the thing with the Borg/Romulan alliance at V'Ger's homeworld or somewhere and how Monitor/Enterprise rips up the Warbird from the inside. Also Riker running around the crashed saucer section while being shot at by a warbird and the Farragut getting blowed up good. It gets progressively more weirder and stupider in later books but I remember there being at least a couple of good action scenes or ideas in each book.
