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.'"

Comments

Re:hmmm

[Attaturk]

The thing that annoyed me the most about Star Trek, and it was most common in the Next Generation, was the idiotic idea of solving a made-up scientific problem with made-up technology. It has no value to a plot; actually it's the opposite of plot, if there is such a thing.

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.

Re:And ST is being picked on....

[chrysrobyn]

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:

Kaylee: Catalyzer on the port compression coil blew. It's where the trouble started.
Mal: Okay, I need that in captain dummy-talk, Kaylee.
Kaylee: We're dead in the water.

And that's about as "technobabble to assist the plot" as Firefly got.