Star Trek: More Gorn Headcanon

If I’m not writing about Klingons, I’m writing about Gorn.

We know so little about the Gorn, really, because the original costume was hot and uncomfortable and still looked a little hokey. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to use them again, even if they had a better idea than “kill humans, grrr”. Follow-on media and even official canon therefore made up pretty much whatever they wanted.

Technology didn’t improve matters much. The CGI Gorn in Enterprise seemed a little too … CGI. Only two decades later did Strange New Worlds depict the species again, albeit as horror movie monsters with lots of concealing shadows.

My preferred in-universe reasons the Gorn appear so seldom are below.

Why We Know So Little

The Gorn’s mysterious, reclusive reputation stems from the following:

• Gorn never met sapient beings besides themselves before. (At least not for long.) Some believed that humans (and Shhr’k¹) simply found the colony buildings Gorn hunted them through, and idly speculated about the formidable species that built them. Others didn’t care: anything that wasn’t Gorn was prey. The Cestus III treaty changed all that, naturally, but some Gorn still cling to the ways of the hunter, regardless of sapience.

• Gorn are highly territorial, especially with offworlders. “That is yours, this is mine” pervades much of their thinking. Even Gorn on Starbase 25, living among humans, draw very clear boundaries between their space and others space, their lives and others lives. They regard lot of details outsiders want to know as simply none of their business.

• After Cestus III the Gorn have tried mightily to clean up their image as ruthless hunters. Letting humans return to Cestus III was not about guilt or shame – two concepts they don’t really grasp – but a strategy to influence public opinion in the Federation. They altered their entire lifecycle just to get along with the Federation.² Again, not because they feel bad, but because they’re scared. Gorn have keenly honed survival instincts. A huge, mostly decentralized government whose “explorers” come armed to the teeth, no matter what they might say, feels like an existential threat.

  Gorn understand the Romulans, mostly: the strong survive, the weak perish, even if their definition of weak seems over-broad. The Federation’s abstract and impractical ideals, coupled with their eventual victory (or at least stalemate) in every war they’ve fought, confuses the hell out of them.

Why We Know Anything

What we know about them comes from Provisional Lieutenant “Trasssk”. The lieutenant wanted to join the Federation, but as a genetically altered Gorn they ran afoul of the anti-Augment laws. Instead, Starfleet intelligence took them on as an analyst on the condition they never assume command. With rumors of the Federation modifying the Augment Ban, “Trasssk” may yet get to fly a starship.

Gorn Names

By the way, the translation of Gorn names has given rise to two schools of thought:

1. Approximate the sounds of Gorn speech, even if a Gorn wouldn’t recognize the sounds as their own language.
2. Translate the meaning of a name into Federation Standard, which has its own perils. A Gorn legate arrived in a ship whose name translated as “Dung Shoveler”. The legate was appalled at the humans’ behavior, as Imperator Dung Shoveler rose from humble and smelly origins to rule the Hegemony (or at least its military, maybe) during the pivotal Twelfth Imperium … by which time the station personnel had long since stopped listening.

The “Hegemony”

Most sources give the name of the Gorn government as either the Gorn Hegemony or (less often) the Gorn Confederation. Here’s what that might mean.

All Gorn worlds are equal, but some are more equal than others. In the halls of power everygorn knows that the planetary governors who run more important planets get more attention and resources than those running lesser planets, otherwise they’d run better planets. The hierarchy of worlds is, roughly this:

1. The Core Worlds:
   • The Homeworld (Gornar/Gornu/Gdhar), where the Imperator rules. (Or at least rules the interstellar fleets, Federation intelligence isn’t sure.)
   • Between two and seven Hegemon Worlds, ruled by the Most Venerable Elders of the Hegemony. Federation Intelligence isn’t sure how many or which worlds they are, but they’re almost certainly ones in the next category. Almost certainly.
2. Central Worlds: regional capitols, transit hubs, shipyards. A majority of Gorns live on one of these worlds.
3. Middle worlds: populated settlements but nowhere near as populated as the Central Worlds.
4. Breeder Worlds: mostly wilderness where non-sapient Gorn young devour animals and each other. Culling stations dot the wilderness, generally every few thousand meters or so. They pull in fully grown young and attempt to teach them (or break them, depending on whose side you’re on). Those who learn the Gorn language and how not to eat everything they see are relocated to a “primary school” in a town full of Adults. Those who can’t are killed and fed to their siblings.
5. Colonies: new settlements that either haven’t grown yet, or can’t because they’re inhospitable and/or only of military importance. Sometimes these worlds have an orbital base where starships can restock and make repairs.
6. Border Worlds: worlds close to Federation Space or near the Gorn’s Neutral Zone with the Romulans. (Unlike the more famous one, the whole concept is new to both sides and neither one fully trusts it yet.)
7. Outposts: Worlds either unclaimed, in contested space, or shared by the Federation and the Hegemony. The best known example is Cestus III since the late 23rd century, and Starbase 25 in the mid to late 24th.

The Three Ages of Gorn

Young

In the “old days” Gorn young were little more than hungry animals. Ever since they crawl from the corpse of their host, a young Gorn would simply hunt and eat until they reached physical maturity in a matter of months, sometimes weeks depending on the availability of prey. Naturally this colored the Gorn’s attitude to other creatures: other species, even weaker members of their own, existed simply to feed and serve the Gorn.

After the Great Experiment began Gorn physical development kept pace with their intellectual development. No longer did Adults have to trap, break, and train wild young in order to forge good soldiers and citizens. Neotenes, and the later young of gendered Gorn wanted to learn. Even if they balked, these “children” proved physically weaker than Adults, and easier to manage.

Adult

Even before the Gorn Elders took the reins of evolution, “adulthood” meant more than physical maturity. The wild Breeder young had to learn to be an Adult: to suppress impulses, to defer pleasures, to withstand pain, and to use their developing linguistic, intellectual, and pro-social brains.

To be a Gorn Adult, then, is to be a functioning and obedient member of Gorn society. Breeder Adults had a few outlets for their instincts: hunts, conquests of “lesser” (prey) species, ritualized fights between Adults which inflicted acceptable amounts of harm. Neotene Adults needed those outlets far less, while Gendered Adults have other urges Gorn Elders are still trying to socially engineer for the good of the Hegemony.

Elder

Some call the Hegemony a gerontocracy, which is both accurate and misleading. Adult and Elder Gorn grow very slowly during their lives, no more than a millimeter every few years, but after two or three centuries an Elder Gorn can stand 250 to 300 cm, and by no means a weakling. For Elder Gorn death by natural causes isn’t heart disease or brittle bones but the square-cube law.

Few non-Gorn have ever met a such a venerable Gorn. Their very size makes traveling off-world problematic; offworlders have met legates from the government, perhaps even a senator (one of thousands according to some sources), but no Gorn with power in their own right.

The Elders are the Gorn Hegemony’s leaders and repositories of wisdom. That said, these changing times have upended millennia of accepted “wisdom”. Not only have their genetic and social engineering Experiment yielded surprising results, the very notion of species not merely equal but superior to them has left many Elders in denial and still others struggling to catch up. Managing the arm’s length relationship with the Federation, with the Metron keeping silent watch, has made the Hegemony increasingly and unexpectedly anxious about their own long-term survival.

On the Origin of Gorn

How does a species of literally virulent super-predators turn into a civilized starfaring species? (For certain definitions of “civilized”.)

One theory holds that the Gorn homeworld used to host even more vicious predators. The Gorn lifecycle evolved to ensure that these supposed super-predators never wiped out the Gorn species. Evnentually the precursors of the Gorn Elders took a good look at the world around them, developed tool use and technology, and wiped out the super-predators.

A more radical theory holds that the Gorn Elders are far older and more sophisticated than we suppose. These proto-Elders had a lifecycle that any Earth xenobiologist would recognize: birth (or hatching), childhood, adulthood, mating. These proto-Elders made the current Gorn “Breeders” and their rapid (and disquieting) life cycle to avoid some population catastrophe … or worse, to clear and settle planets quickly. Eventually the Breeder generations took over from the older proto-Elder species.

Gorn informants say nothing about either theories. The official story is that “the old days are shrouded in myth”. It’s possible only the Elders really know the truth. Perhaps even they don’t know.