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Why Charles Stross Hates Star Trek
daria42 writes "British sci-fi author Charles Stross has confessed that he has long hated the Star Trek franchise for its relegation of technology as irrelevant to plot and character development — and the same goes for similar shows such as Babylon Five. The problem, according to Stross, is that as Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore has described in a recent speech, the writers of Star Trek would simply 'insert' technology or science into the script whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance; 'then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.'"
You're thinking of 'deus ex machina', which is a plot device along the lines of "and suddenly a god-like being appeared and fixed everything". It's the fate of all lazy fiction and, sadly, it's not restricted to sci-fi - although the opportunity to invent suitable technobabble does make it rather easier.
The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances.
I've been watching a lot of "Outer Limits" on Hulu of late (some of the best episodes aren't available there or on Netflix - only on DVD. What gives?!?). The best stories are about how people interact with aliens, their technology or both or with humans technology and progress. One episode has a plot based on transportation and duplicating folks and how people might deal with it. Or another plot that finds an alien and assumes their hostile only to find out they're friendly and we humans over reacted. Sometimes, it's the reverse. I painted some broad strokes here but I think I'm making my point. Although, some episodes were kind of hokey - the one with Alyssa Milano "Caught in the Act" was so-so, but it was nice seeing her half naked - what a doll!
Many of Star Trek's episodes were nothing but humans dealing with human subjects with a lot of technology around. The Naked Time (and the copy on ST:TNG) episode is a perfect example. It could have happened anywhere at anytime. The fact that it was on a spaceship really didn't add anything to the story other than filler.
Star Wars isn't any better, btw.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Fyi, Zoic Studios was responsible for the effects in both Firefly and BSG, which is why they both looked so good :-)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The best of the modern hard SF writers is Larry Niven, but he, like all aging SF writers, has fallen off the bandwagon. By the second Ringworld book, he was more obssessed with various humanoids fucking than with a storyline, and the last Ringworld book was just unreadable garbage.
But stuff like the Neutron Star stories, those are damned good hard (or at least semi-hard) SF with interesting characters and at least half-believable solutions.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Duct tape...you're forgetting Duct tape.
Young man, you will bite your tongue after speaking of Firefly with such disrespect!
Compare the technobabble of TNG to Firefly. How many times did the tachyon thing have to get reversed, repolarized, resynchronized or whatever in order to solve some time spacial anomaly?
Firefly ep Out of Gas:
And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.
Huh, I don't remember that episode. I do remember the Voyager one where Paris and Janeway get it on as some sort of ultra-evolved alligator but can be miraculously returned to normal by the doctor. Something about reaching Warp 10... or did theirs go to 11?
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
IIRC, when jms started the show, he ran everything he could past the JPL (who were big fans) to get their take on things. Outside of the jump gates, which were a necessary plot point, everything had at least *some* grounding in real world science, however tenuous. The jump gates had some gag line about being "(C) Minbari/Centauri Consortium", and they deliberately didn't explain how they worked, so as to prevent humans from making cheap knockoffs.
B5 itself actually looked like some of the proposed space stations, using centripetal force for gravity, etc. The handheld weapons were PPGs rather than slug throwers, because handguns in space have all sorts of problems.
There was obviously a lot of "this is beyond you" technology (Minbari, Vorlon, Shadow, and Centauri), but the story was never about the tech. It was about the politics that used the tech.
In contrast, Star Trek just made up tech as required, and promptly forgot about it at episode's end. Need to transport Picard to another galaxy? Just sprinkle some plot dust over the transporter, and hey, he can transport 57.2 light years safely. It's not like the Federation would ever bother to research that for future use or anything. In one episode, Barcley became super smart and actually dragged the Enterprise (at something like warp 56) to a planet that had given him the brainpower to upgrade the Enterprise to the point that they'd come visit. Why aren't all starships doing warp 56 afterwards? No technical or military use?
In the first season of B5, they came up with an alien medical device that could be used to cure or kill. Surprisingly, in the second season, they actually remembered it, and used it to restore a character (at cost to two other characters). It was deemed too dangerous to use. Lo and behold, in season four, it showed up again, and this time it did kill someone. Can anyone honestly see that happening in Trek?
My problem with Trek was that the tech was nothing but a plot crutch. Engineers could research, develop, and implement a generation's worth of technology, in a day, on board ship, in order to solve a crisis. And it would promptly be forgotten. How many episodes would be resolved if they just used the magic wand they created six episodes back? Too many. So, they'd handwave it away.
Yes, it does. (Warning: TvTropes.org is a huge timesuck.)
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
B5 used a some arbitrary technobabble, but it was used sparingly. Most of it was advanced technology that was used consistently, and with limitations that they stuck with throughout the series.
You mention hyperspace, and that's a good example. Sure, the hyperspace gates were an arbitrary technology that let them bridge interstellar distances quickly, but it wasn't instantaneous -- it still took time to traverse hyperspace, and more or less in proportion to the distance away from the destination. Sometimes that was days. They still had to build the gates, and in one episode they showed the ship necessary to build them. Only larger ships had the ability to open a portal to hyperspace directly. Small ones were stuck in normal space and had access to hyperspace only via gates (or by tagging along with bigger ships).
B5 also spent a fair amount of time trying to keep the ships in normal space behaving like they would according to normal, everyday physics, and showed battle strategies that reflected that (e.g., ships did not have to meet "right side up" all the time as if they were sailing on a 2D map). Even the B5 station itself made a decent amount of sense -- with low/zero-g sections for different purposes, and rotation to generate artificial gravity. You even had characters looking out windows on the floor (i.e. the outer hull of the rotating sections). They didn't have to do all that, but they obviously tried to get it right rather than inventing "particle of the week" to explain things.
Finally, some alien societies had artificial gravity on board their ships, some didn't (e.g., all of Earth's ships). The way it was done technologically was never explained because it wasn't important. The uneven distribution of the technology across alien societies was important to the story, and that distribution made sense. So, the less advanced cultures were stuck with having rotating sections of their larger ships. Smaller ships didn't even have that, and the crew were therefore shown strapped into their chairs like you should be if you were doing maneuvers using normal physics.
They still stretched things, of course, and there were flaws (e.g., the first thing you'd probably do on a ship with rotating sections when you go into battle would be to stop the rotation to avoid having to change the angular momentum as you are maneuvering) but there was a lot more attention to keeping things realistic than usual, and when they had to make stuff up for the sake of plot, they did it once and more or less stuck with it.
It was only with shows like Firefly or BSG that I remember a comparable attention to detail. I sure as heck wouldn't lump Star Trek and B5 together. Bad example. There's never the attention in SF TV shows as in SF novels, but B5 didn't do badly for TV.
Also, time travel was used precisely once, required an entire planet worth of power generation to implement, and spanned three episodes: one near the end of the first season, and a two-parter in the middle of the third season; henceforth, it was never used again.
The other key to the Babylon Squared/War Without End time travel is that it stays consistent. In Star Trek, characters are repeatedly traveling backwards in time to fix or prevent something. In B5, everything happened because they went back in time, and going back in time simply ensured that what happened did happen.
bat'leth
Even better - she was complaining about that compression coil for at least a few episodes BEFORE it finally blew, adding a touch of foreshadowing.
That kind of thing is called Deus Ex Machina and has been considered a poor plot device since antiquity.
Stross is a professional author of note. Not as many people talk about print SF as TV, but the people who are talking about him are the people who give awards, such as the Hugo he got for Glasshouse. They're people such as Gardner Dozois (who edits Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), who said "Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow.". Publisher's Weekly called Stross "One of the hottest short story writers in the field" in reviewing his first novel, and critically lauded every novel since. That's a tip of the iceberg description of who's talking about Stross, as the man has literally over a hundred favorable reviews from pro sources even at casual inspection. John Carmack (ID games), and Bruce Schneier (who you damned well ought to have heard of on Slashdot), read Stross with praise. His books get reviewed outside the normal SF field boundaries, for example by Popular Science and Scientific American.
So if Stross doesn't have enough chops to talk about Trek, I seriously doubt if you have enough to talk about Stross, by your own argument. If it's fair to demand he have a presence in TV and not just books, then it's equally fair to demand you have at least one professionally published SF work, or STFU.
Who is John Cabal?
200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?)
Orlando Furioso appeared in 1516 and involved space travel - specifically, a trip to the moon. Bit more of a fantasy story than pure SF as Horace Gold would have described it, but it's not totally out of character.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Seems to be a pretty standard communist military run state to me.
I'm sure they look great if you see them through the eyes of those reasonably high up the chain in the military too.
I'm sorry you don't like the fact that Mythbusters isn't science. It's the kind of "entertainment" the GP was talking about - completely unscientific trash. What they do to the scientific method, most wouldn't do to their worst enemy. They aren't teaching anyone the scientific method - they're teaching people that controls in an experiment are optional, and that you can generalise from a tiny data sample. Learning science from the Mythbusters shows is like learning gourmet cooking from a burger flipper at MacDonalds.
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