What sort of book is Engines of Destiny?
- Thread starter JWolf
- Start date
Never bothered me any. I just assumed that that just meant that in the Borg-altered timeline seen in First Contact, the Borg who reached 2063 Earth continued to exist because they'd originated in an "alternate" timeline (the same way, for instance, that Future!Janeway didn't cease to exist upon changing her own past in such a manner that should have ensured she'd never exist), assimilated 21st Century Earth, tried to contact the rest of the Collective in the Delta Quadrant, and then realized, "Hey, that's weird, there are no more Borg anywhere else in the galaxy."
So in this altered timeline, from everyone else's perspective, Earth and the Alpha Quadrant are the origins of the Borg, rather than Arehaz in the Delta Quadrant.
What makes you think the Federation would have ever formed, at all, had United Earth not been founded?
The Federation's job -- be it Starfleet or DTI -- is to preserve their history, not someone else's potential alternate better history, nor to protect some "uptime" faction's history. Just theirs, period. And certainly it's the obligation of a Federation Starfleet officer to preserve the Federation first and foremost.
ETA:
Well, if the premise behind Engines of Destiny is that Kirk's rescue from the Nexus in 2369 prevented him from saving Picard in 2371, then Picard would have still been Locutus in 2366-2367. He just would have died in 2371, thereby preventing him from defeating the cube in Earth orbit in 2373 and then following the sphere back to counter its attempts to change the events of 2063.
ETA:
Why's that? For one thing, Star Trek: Destiny doesn't give us any indication that the Collective had any memory of their own origin. In fact, the very fact that they adopted for themselves the name "Borg," out of the broken last thought of a Human being "assimilated" by the degraded remains of Sedin's consciousness, strongly implies that that initial "assimilation" process caused the early Collective to lose any information it had on its own pre-Collective past. After all, why would they only use the fragment of the last word of the last thought of a dying man for themselves otherwise?
Further, there's no particular reason to think that the Borg's actions in Star Trek: First Contact led to the creation of the Federation. Sure, it's possible that Riker's and Co.'s example led Cochrane to abandon his cynicism in favor of idealism (presumably thereby becoming a leader in Earth's planetary unification movement, thereby becoming one of the "Founding Fathers" of United Earth, which of course later leads the way towards creating the Federation), but it's just as possible that he would have embraced such idealism for the reasons history records -- the eye-opening gravity of encountering extraterrestrial life for the first time.
Makes no sense. If their goal was to send a ship to the past to bait the Enterprise into chasing them back so they'd inspire Cochrane to create United Earth (and thereby U.E. would send out Hernandez aboard the NX-02, leading to the creation of the Borg), it would make more sense for the Collective to send the sphere into the past while the battle is still raging, thereby luring the Enterprise away from the cube to "restore history" and leaving the cube behind to finish defeating Starfleet and assimilating Earth in 2373.
What was with the attempt to take over the Enterprise, then? Such a plan would only require an initial strike against Cochrane on their part; it would be much more logical and efficient for them to simply allow the Enterprise to destroy their sphere and make no attempt to assimilate it, thereby allowing the Enterprise crew to inspire Cochrane with no Borgy distractions aboard ship.
* * *
Christopher suggests in Watching the Clock that the Borg in First Contact traveled to 2063 after an uptime faction in the Temporal Cold War thwarted other uptime factions' attempts to prevent the Collective from gaining time travel technology. That's possible, but still leaves open the question of why the Collective tried to change Earth's history in the first place.
Personally, I'm inclined to assume that the Borg are as loathe to use time travel as any other 24th Century faction, for fear of losing access to the advanced technologies created by the unassimilated cultures upon whom the Collective relies for its own technological progression, and that they only use time travel techniques like the one in Star Trek: First Contact as a way to test the ingenuity of cultures whom they find especially resistant (a hypothesis offered in Mission Gamma, Book Four: Lesser Evil).
Heck, maybe the Borg had every intention of un-doing their own interference if they discovered the Federation wasn't able to un-do it themselves. That might go a long way towards explaining how Seven of Nine (and, therefore, presumably the rest of the Collective before she was separated from them) knew about the Enterprise-E's role in thwarting their plan in VOY's "Year of Hell."
Well, you'd have to take that up with Gene DeWeese, then, because the altered, Borg-dominated timeline in EoD is set in 2293.
That's not actually what I said in WTC.
What I said was that it was an uptime faction (the Sphere-Builders, in fact) who gave the Borg a time machine and put the idea of time travel into their heads in the first place, using them as their agents so that their own involvement would be hidden. As Lucsly explained, left to their own devices, the Borg would never consider something as convoluted and creative as traveling back in time to unmake an enemy. If they suffered a setback -- especially a setback as minor as the loss of a single cube would've been to them -- they'd just keep sending more cubes and drones at the problem until they beat it. The events of FC make no sense as something the Borg decided to do on their own. It's completely out of character for them. It's just not the way they deal with problems, and there's no reason why the Borg of 2373 would've considered the Federation a serious enough threat to justify such extreme measures. So I figured the way to make sense of it was to say that they were just patsies working for someone else, someone who gave them the time machine and pointed them in the desired direction.
Ah, okay, well nevermind then!
See what happens when I open my mouth before finishing the book? I've not finished reading all of DTI, but read the bit where they debriefed Picard and speculated about it being a TCW front, and thought that that was what you were referring to earlier in this thread.
If you mean the sphere connection, that had nothing to do with my thinking.
And I should make it clear that Engines of Destiny had no bearing on Watching the Clock in any way. I think there are continuity issues that render it incompatible with the main novel timeline that WTC is part of, so I didn't consider it to be part of the backstory I was drawing on.
I just wanted to pick an antagonist who had reason to want to erase humanity's warp era from history and sufficient ruthlessness to carry it out.
And I should make it clear that Engines of Destiny had no bearing on Watching the Clock in any way. I think there are continuity issues that render it incompatible with the main novel timeline that WTC is part of, so I didn't consider it to be part of the backstory I was drawing on.
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
If you've got the eBook, you can have a cover. Just no physical pages.
It's set before Scotty got the SCE, I think.
Too cutesy?
Too unnecessary. The sphere is a fundamental shape. In fact, it's the best possible shape for a spacecraft hull -- the simplest pressure vessel, the shape with the lowest ratio of surface to volume, etc. If the Borg really gave a damn about efficiency, all their ships would be spheres. Besides, that's far from the only Borg sphere we've seen, though it was the first one we saw.
Nope. It acts as a sequel to both "Relics" and "Generations".
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Engines_of_Destiny
It takes place years before the SCE series, and I believe it was originally written before the SCE series was created.
However, Mollmann and Schuster did utilize elements of Engines of Destiny for Scotty's SCE backstory in the SCE's The Future Begins.
And that's my favorite thing about this book - it never does spell it out to you. I thought that was terrific. I'd kind of been hoping for a similar situation with the "new" timeline set up in Star Trek (2009), but I suppose JJ and company had to spell out what had happened.
okay cool thanks for that it still sounds like a great book I put it in my ewish area on my nook.
First Contact? Pfft. It's because, in that timeline, the resurrected Kirk wasn't there to flush the Borg homeworld at the end of The Return.
