Spheroids And Cubes

Mirkheim, VII.

"Sandra could imagine the foreign ship, a spheroid like hers, never meant to land on a planet, studded with gun emplacements, missile launchers, energy projectors, armored in forcefields and steel, magazines bearing the death of half a continent." (pp. 115-116)

We have become used to such spacecraft in fiction, for example Valenderay in The People Of The Wind. However, I learned something new (to me) today. Borg spaceships include giant "Cubes" that are all of a piece, not divided into weapons, Engineering, life support etc, and that automatically repair themselves very quickly when damaged.

A cuboid, especially one several kilometers wide, seems an unusual object to move around in space but sf writers have to think outside the box. Larry Niven exported an alien species, the kzinti, from his Known Space future history series into a Star Trek animated episode and Poul Anderson contributed three stories to the Man-Kzin Wars period of Known Space but neither Niven nor Anderson tackled the Borg. I suspect, in any case, that they were not around in Anderson's time.