Ad Luna #8: The Essay, Part 6 – Assimilation
So Ad Luna has had its first review in, from The Wood Between the Worlds – and it’s 5 stars, which is rather nice! Check it out here.
Back to business; namely the penultimate bit of this essay you’ve all been suffering through for over a month. This chapter deals with the ever-popular concept of assimilation; of contagion, infection. Think zombie viruses, that sort of thing. Or the Borg. This chapter was basically just an excuse for me to write about the Borg. The Borg are cool.
Anyway, enjoy.
6 – Assimilation and Contagion
The fear of losing one’s individual identity is one played on often in science-fiction. Zombie viruses, alien hive-minds, Doctor Who’s Cybermen and The Expanse’s protomolecule: all evoke the terror of losing what makes us human – our thoughts, our feelings, our agency, and ultimately our very humanity, transforming into an utterly alien and utterly terrifying ‘other’. One of SF’s archetypal assimilators are Star Trek’s Borg, whose civilizational goal is described succinctly in First Contact:
“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”
There is no room in the Borg Collective for individuality, for the “integrity of the autonomous individual”. The Borg are a truly terrifying prospect; a legion of identical, expressionless drones, all bent on converting our protagonists into something just like them, no longer human – no longer anything but Borg. The Borg feature heavily in Voyager, but in this chapter I intend to focus on TNG’s original Borg episodes, particularly The Best of Both Worlds, I, Borg and the movie First Contact; episodes focusing heavily on the loss of individual identity and its associated fears. Where, then, do we come across such fears in Lucian’s True History? At the very beginning of the book: with the Vine-Women. Like the Borg the Vine-Women are assimilating creatures, seducing and then absorbing Jean-Lucian’s crew, transforming them into beings no longer human. Lucian evokes similar fears to those presented in Trek – but what were the roots of those fears? What inspired the Borg, and what inspired the Vine-Women – and how might those different inspirations reflect differently on our modern and Lucian’s Roman societies?
The Vine-Women are the very first aliens encountered by Jean-Lucian’s crew. They are intelligent – able to speak three languages, at least collectively, and they communicate effectively with the crew. Unlike the Borg, the Vine-Women have some degree of individuality – but they do have a common and destructive goal. Upon kissing them, the crew become drunk; on prolonged contact, “the men are assimilated and lose their human individuality.” Transformed from human into hybrid, the crew are unable to escape, doomed to stay rooted forever:
“Already branches had grown from their fingers, tendrils entwined them, and they were on the point of bearing fruit… any minute.”
Whether or not the victims are transformed from male to female is not stated (only implied by the ‘bearing fruit’), but if they are then this only compounds the horror of assimilation – both humanity and gender have been stripped away by the transformation. Having watched their comrades being stripped of their humanity; a fate “worse than dying”; in the manner of Sir Robin, Jean-Lucian’s crew bravely run away – a far more sensible response than is generally pursued in SF like Trek. Their fear is compounded by the Vine-Women’s connection to wine; the “civilised drink”, mark of a cultured society; a connection implying that the Vine-Women are likewise civilised, lulling Jean-Lucian’s crew into a false sense of security before their true nature is revealed.
The same fear of loss of identity is the focus of The Best of Both Worlds, whose first episode culminates in the forced transformation of Captain Picard into Locutus of Borg. If even the strong and stoic Picard – the show’s protagonist – can be assimilated, then anyone can, compounding the audience’s sense of danger. Enterprise’s Regeneration enhances audience fear in the same way, through the Borg’s infection of Doctor Phlox – the only person able to treat assimilation. Lucian misses a trick by not naming any of his fellow sailors to provide a more striking emotional punch. Like the Borg, the Vine-Women transform their victims into near-simulacra of themselves; the only difference is aesthetic, with roots and leaves taking the place of mechanical implants. The principal difference is that that Vine-Women do not seem to be intentionally hostile towards the crew – or at least their motivations are unclear, for Jean-Lucian does not remain long enough to ask. The crew of the Enterprise, by contrast, fight to free Picard until they have no choice but to destroy the Borg Cube. There is a point at which saving one’s infected friends becomes impossible, and both the Enterprise’s and Jean-Lucian’s crews are aware of it – Jean-Lucian the character is simply more overwhelmed by such an encounter than the experienced Enterprise crew, and Lucian the author has more exciting places to visit.
The Vine-Women are, of course, explicitly inspired by the myth of Daphne, transformed into a tree to escape the amorous Apollo (though inverted, with the eternally virgin Daphne parodied by the inherently sexual Vine-Women). The Borg were inspired by the ever-expanding field of cybernetics; “augmented humanity” exaggerated and made monstrous. Both the TH and Trek took something familiar from their respective societies’ cultural consciousness and exaggerated it – but this was far from the only inspiration for the Borg, and, I believe, the Vine-Women. The Borg, introduced as replacements for the “waste of time” that were the hyper-capitalist Ferengi, appear to have been heavily inspired by American fears of Communism and the USSR. The Borg were originally to be an insectoid species (before budget constraints forced a redesign into humanoid cyborgs); unified in purpose and identical in appearance. All Borg drones labour for the good of the collective, and all are expendable. In Q Who? (their first appearance) the Borg do not react to the deaths of several drones aboard the Enterprise – why bother? All Borg are, essentially, one, united in motivation in a twisted imagining of the ultimate goal of a Communist society. Later Borg episodes allude to the Soviet Union in particular – I, Borg, aired in 1992, showed a Borg drone freed from the collective hive-mind and praised for his newfound individuality, in a plot echoing the recent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the newfound freedom of former Soviet-dominated nations. The Borg evoke a cultural fear of ideological infection by Communism present throughout Trek. Both the Klingons and Romulans represented different aspects of the Red Menace in TOS; a fear that had spread through the USA since the Second World War, felt particularly harshly in the film industry thanks to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)’s blacklists in the 1950s. Even years after the end of the Cold War, TNG’s Borg demonstrate that such fears were still present in the American, and perhaps wider Western, cultural subconscious.
The Borg play, therefore, on an ideological fear – but what of the Vine-Women? There were no Communists in the Second Sophistic, and the Vine-Women lack the hive-mind characteristics that fuel that fear of the Borg. The fear of the Vine-Women’s unstoppable infection of Jean-Lucian’s crew is a physical one – and based, I believe, on a real infection. In 165 AD, when Lucian was just forty, the Antonine Plague swept across the Empire, killing five million people including Marcus Aurelius’ co-emperor Lucius. Deaths continued until 180, and up to two thousand people died in Rome every day at the plague’s peak. Whether the TH was written during the plague’s outbreak or afterwards, the memory of such a devastating, unstoppable disease, not discriminating against any class or social group, remained strong in the Roman imagination for many years; Marcus Aurelius wrote of it at length in his Meditations and even mentioned it in his dying words. Lucian himself had a personal connection to the horror of the plague; he had met Emperor Lucius, the disease’s most famous victim, in 163. The Vine-Women, like the plague, impart an unstoppable infection; incurable, untreatable. Their infection does not kill – it is worse, leaving its victims as living, breathing reminders of what robbed them of everything that made them human. The Vine-Women seem to represent and exaggerate all the horrors of the Antonine Plague.
Just as the Borg might represent America’s worst fears of Communism, the Vine-Women could plausibly embody Rome’s fears and sorrows after – or during – the Antonine Plague. Through cognitive estrangement, two similar villains mirror two similar fears. Communism and plague may seem as different as can be, but in the minds of Trek’s and Lucian’s audiences they were both insidious, unstoppable menaces, undermining the foundations of society itself.
Borg Drone, Star Trek: First Contact, dir. Jonathan Frakes (Paramount, 1996), 0:10:30 – 0:10:40
Rose, Margaret, ‘Cyborg Selves in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: The Next Generation’, p.1204
Partly because they make for good comparison, but mostly because I have yet to watch Voyager!
Georgiadou, Aristoula, ‘Lucian’s Vine-Women and Dio’s Libyan Women: Variations on a Theme’, in Mnemosyne, vol.50 (1997), p.207
Lucian, 1.8
TNG 5.23: I, Borg, dir. Robert Lederman (10/5/1992), 0:27:53 – 0:27:59
If, however, the Enterprise always left strange situations well alone, we would barely have any Trek to watch.
Hartog, p.166
TNG: The Best of Both Worlds 1, 0:43:44 – 0:44:16
ENT 2.23: Regeneration, dir. David Livingston (5/2/2003), 0:18:07 – 0:20:00
He fails to do so throughout the TH, naming no original crew members.
TNG: The Best of Both Worlds 1, 0:42:38 – 0:43:28
Lucian, 1.8
Melinda Snodgrass, 50-Year V2, p.160
Maurice Hurley, 50-Year V2, p.160
Maurice Hurley, 50-Year V2, p.161
TNG 2.16: Q Who?, dir. Rob Bowman (8/5/1998), 0:21:15 – 0:24:00
TNG: I, Borg, 0:36:35 – 0:37:00
“…the Klingons were a parallel for the Communist bloc…”: Leonard Nimoy, 50-Year V1, p.529; “the Romulans represented the 1960’s Chinese Communists”: John Logan, ‘Introduction’ in Dillard, J.M, Star Trek: Nemesis novelisation (Pocket Books, 2002), p.xx
Tuszynski, Susan, ‘A Cold War Cautionary Tale: Heterosexuality and Ideology in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur’ in Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol.34 (2006), p.118
Birley, Anthony, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography (Routledge, 2016), p.149
Viglas, p.159
