What sort of book is Engines of Destiny?
- Thread starter JWolf
- Start date
^It's a novel about Scotty post-"Relics" going back in time to save Kirk from the Nexus, and inadvertently creating an alternate timeline in the process (because if Kirk wasn't in the Nexus to save Picard, Picard couldn't save Earth from the Borg in the next movie, so Earth got assimilated). So it contains elements of both late-era TOS and TNG. It doesn't "fit" into any neat cubbyhole.
^ Is that why we briefly see a Borg Earth in ST:FC?
Uhh, no, that's because the Borg sphere went back and assimilated Earth before the Enterprise and Picard went back to undo it. Why in the world would you imagine that the explanation for a canonical onscreen event would be something from a novel that was written years later?
I just thought that it could (retroactively speaking) have been an "echo" of the Engines timeline. 
Especially since 1) The Enterprise still existed, and 2) it was still following the Borg sphere, which had yet to fully arrive in the past and complete its mission...
Especially since 1) The Enterprise still existed, and 2) it was still following the Borg sphere, which had yet to fully arrive in the past and complete its mission...
^But it hadn't followed it yet. The FC assimilated Earth and the EoD assimilated Earth were close temporal cousins, but they weren't the same timeline, even if they only practical difference between them would be that in one case the Borg sphere that assimilated Earth would have a record of being attacked by Picard and the Enterprise, and the other one wouldn't (well, there might've been more to it than that. I guess EoD implied that even if the cube hadn't been intercepted, it was always the plan to go back in time upon arriving at Earth rather than assimilate the federation present-day. It's been a long time, I don't precisely recall).
I haven't read Engines of Destiny, but that seems counter-intuitive. Why would the Borg have bothered to travel to 2063 when they would more than likely have had no problem defeating the fleet protecting Earth and then from there assimilating Starbase 1, orbiting satellites and stations, any ships they want, and then gradually beginning the process of assimilating a now-defenseless Earth?
One possibility is that they might've been looking to give a quick major upgrade to their earlier selves in the Delta Quadrant and thus ensure the Collective could even more quickly come to dominate. I'm pretty sure that's part of the reason they cannibalize the Enterprise deflector dish into a beacon in canon!Trek, right (the other being reinforcements, again IIRC)?
No, they're only messing with the deflector dish in ST:FC to contact the 21st Century Collective.
And why would they want a "quick" upgrade when assimilating a pre-warp Earth and three-centuries-less-advanced Vulcan, Andor, etc., would lose them the Federation's more advanced technology? And for that matter, why would the Borg be in such a "rush" to have Federation space under their heel by 2373 that they'd need to resort to time travel?
Time travel makes sense as something that's done as a sort of random test on the Federation's adaptability, but I don't really see its use otherwise.
But that's a problem with First Contact itself, not with EoD. The bottom line is, the way the Borg used time travel in that movie made no sense whatsoever and existed only as a plot gimmick to get the TNG crew back in time. (Although there's a bit in DTI: Watching the Clock that offers a rationalization for it.)
Keep in mind that EoD never explicitly spells out the logic behind why Scotty saving Kirk in 2293 leads to a Borg-assimilated timeline. After all, the story is told from the perspective of Scotty post-"Relics" and other characters from timeframes well before FC, so they'd have no way of knowing about events that hadn't happened yet. It's pretty much left to the audience to fill in the blanks, since we know that preventing Kirk from entering the Nexus would prevent him from saving Picard in GEN, which would plausibly prevent Picard from saving the day in FC. The whys and wherefores weren't discussed in detail because they couldn't have been (though IIRC there were some scenes from the Borg Queen's perspective that obliquely explained things insofar as it was possible).
And it makes sense, especially when you think that with their fairly high level of technology, the Borg should be like cybernetic Krenim.
I say the Borg probably used time travel to conquer many alternate Earths, much as the 23rd century Klingons are said to have done in DS9's Millenium. It's the same theory used in STXI. They created alternate timelines where events unfolded differently.
Not if you've got the ebook
Not if you've got the ebook
If you really want to make things complicated, try reconciling Destiny and First Contact. If the future Borg assimilate the Earth before the Columbia contacts the Caeliar, doesn't that prevent the Collective from forming in the first place? Do the Borg in the Delta Quadrant get erased from history? If so, wouldn't the best outcome have been for the Enterprise to defeat the future Borg but have Cochrane's experiment fail (temporarily), thus retroactively destroying the Borg at the cost of delaying the Federation's birth?
^The way I interpret timelines, it wouldn't be retroactive. The two parallel timelines, the one in which humans achieve warp drive and find the Caeliar and the one where they don't, both exist side-by-side. So the timeline forks into a Y shape, as it were. So time travellers from either timeline who go back before the branching will still find themselves in the same past -- even if something later happens to end one of those branches. As I explained in Watching the Clock, if something happens, it can't unhappen. You can cause two parallel timelines to merge together so that it's as if one of them never existed, but that only means its existence ends after a certain point and it isn't remembered thereafter. But while it existed, it existed, and anyone who left that timeline for another era would still live on even after it ended. (In the same way that, say, the alternate O'Brien from "Visionary" lived on after the "DS9 blows up" future he came from got negated.)
The Borg had to travel back in time to 2063. It was a predestination paradox--they knew that their interference in Earth's history would lead to their eventual creation. So really, First Contact was a big setup. The Borg sent a cube to Sector 001 and baited Picard into showing up by sending him crazy Locutus dreams. When the Enterprise arrived, Picard thought he was destroying the Borg cube with his inside knowledge--but the Borg ship deliberately self-destructed in order to get on with sending the sphere into Earth's past. The Borg were aware that the Enterprise would follow due to their experience with time anomalies, and they fought the Federation ship with one hand tied behind their backs once they were in the past--because they had to lose. By losing, they created the timeline where the NX program would come into being and Columbia would cause their creation.
Oh, sure. I'm not criticizing Engines of Destiny (having never read it), I'm just saying it makes more sense to assume that the Borg conquered the Alpha Quadrant in 2373 than to assume they then traveled back to 2063 from 2373 (since there would have been no Picard at the Battle of Sector 001 to detect the weak point in the cube and direct the rest of the fleet to attack that point).
