While working on my paper (comparing Le Bon's The Crowd to Rudé's The Crowd), a question came to mind. Did Rick Berman read Le Bon's The Crowd before writing Star Trek: First Contact? In The Crowd, Le Bon tells us that the crowd acts with one collective mind and is incapable of individual thought. Okay, that sounds a lot like the Borg to me. Then he tells us that the crowd must have a leader and that leader is often a member of the crowd. Sounds somewhat contradictory, but okay. Then Berman tells us that the Borg also has a leader that is a Borg (The Queen). Coincidence? I think not.
Well, maybe we met the Borg Queen before First Contact, but I must admit that I didn't watch TNG religiously.
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Actually, the Borg Queen shows up for the first time in FC, although she showed up quite a bit later in ST: Voyager.
The Borg first showed up in a second season TNG episode (called Q Who?, I think) and was not written by Berman.
The Borg subsequently appeared in at least three other TNG stories that pre-dated FC.
The functioning analogy, and the concept of the Queen and drones is an ant colony, or so it seems to me.
Well, of course the ant analogy works too, but Star Trek has always been political. The idea that it would be wholly based in the animal kingdom seems highly unlikely to me.
The group-mind concept is sufficiently common in scifi that it is unlikely that the Borg have a specific origin. However, that it may have come fromt he writings you reference is certainly possible.
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