Assimilation is Futile

ASSIMILATION IS FUTILE is the working title for my nonfiction book about local history, queerness, and assimilation.

While I am not a knowledgable Star Trek fan, the phrase “assimilation is futile” is something I wrote down ages ago on a post it and is a spin on the famous phrase “Resistance is Futile”. I loved watching next gen and later series as reruns. I have watched enough to know that Capt. Picard, through community efforts, failed to assimilate permanently to the Borg. Seven-of-Nine also de-assimilated from the Borg. Despite her childhood assimilation seeming like a life sentence, she is able to return to an experience of humanity, albeit changed permanently, psychology, emotionally, and physically.  A similar narrative in the fantasy flavor, occurs to the Unicorn in Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn”. [Spoiler:]She experiences the horror of being human and mortal before returning to her true, immortal form with new knowledge of annihilation no other unicorn has experienced.

“Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace, of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.”― J. Jack Halberstan, The Queer Art of Failure