Re: Vixen tries to do Before Dishonor or: Motherf**king Borg
JoeZhang said:
I think a different tack needs to be taken with the borg, for them to continue to a menace, they need to actually being successful at some level. Maybe this could involve them asslimating half of the Romulan Star Empire or attacking the Klingon empire, just something with a different dynamic.
I think that was part of the problem with
Resistance and
Before Dishonor: Trying to change the Borg...
again. They were more menacing because they actively kill and don't seem to wait for an irritant to arise (although that too was a problem in regards to the continuity of
Resistance/Before Dishonor. J.M Dillard had an entire
Enterprise security team killed off quite violently in her book, and had the Borg actively awaiting the return of the
Enterprise crew, especially near the end. But, in
Before Dishonor, sometimes the Borg would attack preemptively, sometimes they wouldn't. There was a lot of schizophrenic writing in this arc.)
I think one of the problems I had with these two novels was that it seemed to go away from what Starfleet and the Federation were supposed to be about post-Dominion War. How many times was it stressed during
A Time to... and all the various other novels that "We just got Starfleet back on an exploration footing" or something similar? With
Q&A, at least, we got part of that (and it even went back to Q's quote in
All Good Things... about humanity mapping the possibilities of existence and the like). I can recall times when reading where Picard or Riker lamented not exploring back on the
Enterprise-D, after the Farpoint mission. It was explained perfectly (tying back into the "Starfleet finally back on exploration footing" lines), but two opportunities almost appear squandered. I guess I'm regarding
Q&A as the relaunch's
Encounter at Farpoint-An
Enterprise preparing to explore strange new worlds, and fulfilling that credo that every
Trek fan can recite at the drop of a hat. But then we get the "pressing Borg crisis" and Starfleet and the
Enterprise are moved away from exploration to "Let's settle this week's crisis, and then hopefully move on."
And yes, the
Titan and her sister ships are exploring and yes there are other starships exploring. But with the
Enterprise as the face of the TNG Relaunch...I don't know. I just felt that the Borg horse has been beaten beyond death and into a liquid goop seeping into the sand of the ground beneath my feet. And yet we had two more series of lashes beating into the Borg horse-liquid. Two more series of lashes that could have been used to spur on a Cardassian Aid arc, or a "Oooh, sparsely explored Alpha Quadrant sector" arc.
*shrug* I would assume that the writers and editors at Pocket Books would know better than I, a mere fan and connoisseur of
Trek Lit. But these two vintages were bitter, and I await with some expectation and trepidation
Greater Than The Sum
?!??
