Review of
The Beginning
Published:
June 2003
Reviewer Rating:
Avg User Rating:
(3.86)
All in all I thought this was a quality short story. The author managed to build the Borg’s home world in a few short pages. She filled it will a society that believes in advancement and learning, and then tears it down a few pages later. I think Reed also makes the Borg Queen an interesting figure, and it is unclear whether or not she truly embraces what happens to her or if the bots reach her mind and make her okay with it. It’s this ambiguity that I thought was intriguing. On the beginning of the story she thinks about returning to her world’s version of university and just being able to walk and do tasks for herself again. When she begins the treatment and it starts to change her, replace her legs, unsnarl her fingers she loves the feeling but is terrified of her own body. Then there is a time cut and she seems to be at ease with her body and arrogant in its superiority. She uses a terminal in her isolation unit to learn all that she can from it, and this feels in line with her pre-transformation goals, but on top of that seems to be the nanobots desire to fix others too. Maybe her and the probes share her brain, her drive is for knowledge and theirs is for perfection. They coexist in her brain just as her body coexists with organic and inorganic. There was this like subplot that was conflict between the Borg queen and her grandfather that I didn’t love, but hey you can’t win them all!
