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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.
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.
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.