On My Next Publication

Star Trek Magazine editor Paul Simpson announced this today on TrekBBS:

Coming soon to a newsstand near you – Star Trek Magazine 20, which includes a wonderful extract from Una McCormack’s great new DS9 novel The Never-Ending Sacrifice. Also this month, courtesy of Allyn Gibson, a complete history of the Borg, including their appearances in all media, incorporating for the first time, the new information revealed in the Destiny trilogy.

When Paul says it covers “all media,” it covers all media — television, movies, novels, short stories, comic books, manga, video games.

Star Trek Magazine #20 should be available in bookstores and on newsstands in about two or three weeks.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

6 thoughts on “On My Next Publication

  1. Thanks! 🙂

    I think of the article (which, unless Paul changed my title, is “The Grand Unified Theory of the Borg”) as my little contribution to the “Cleaning Up Mack’s Mess” party, as the post-Destiny books have been described on TrekBBS.

    It’s comprehensive, though it doesn’t quite cover everything, because some things were considered “off-limits.” I also had to make some decisions on how to cover, say, the video and computer games; I didn’t want to reference them too much, because they’re out of print and thus inaccessible to most readers, but there were some interesting plot details with Armada, for instance, that couldn’t go unmentioned.

    I’m looking forward to the reaction to the article. Some of the things I point out are going to surprise people. 🙂

  2. I’ll be curious to see how you handled the different origins presented in the Strange New Worlds anthologies.

  3. Two things were considered off-limits. The Return and Strange New Worlds. Hence, the article doesn’t address either.

    Fitting The Return would have been easy; Star Trek: First Contact was retaliation for The Return. 🙂

    Fitting some of the Strange New Worlds stories, though…

    Because my brief for the article excluded them, I didn’t give them any thought. I had a way of reconciling “A Ribbon For Rosie” with Voyager‘s “Dark Frontier,” but that’s to do with how Seven was assimilated, not with the Borg origins.

    The problem I faced quickly was that Destiny presented an origin for the Borg that made perfect sense, but it happened at the wrong time. Some novels referred to Borg attacks in the far distant past, millions and billions of years ago, while Destiny had the Borg’s origins about seven thousand years in the past. Then I rewatched “The Omega Directive,” and suddenly I knew how Destiny could fit. I don’t spell out exactly what happened, but I suggest enough that a reader should be able to piece together how the Destiny origin works.

    And the best thing I came up with for the article, I couldn’t use. I know the true origin of the Borg. I know who built them originally. I know to what purpose. Again, I hint strongly at what happened and when it happened; I just couldn’t explicitly state it.

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