I always suspected she gave good succor. 
Sure, but the information DOES exist. :dubious:
liked
True…although, since they all already know the answer, there isn’t any reason for them to say it aloud.
There’s an early E.E. “Doc” Smith book where the starship captain and the chief engineer take two entire pages to tell each other what a “light year” is. That sort of thing worked in 1935, but it feels painfully artificial today.
Well, yeah, but… Lots of things in modern SF aren’t explained. How do Star Wars ships go FTL? The Millennium Falcon effect looks somewhat “wormholish,” but is it?
How does the Enterprise generate electricity? I know a fan who absolutely insists it involves using matter/antimatter to heat water to steam and running it through turbine generators! Does anyone here believe that?
One of the big rules of Star Trek writing is: don’t make any commitments. Never say anything that someone else, following you, might be bound by. (Certainly not unique to Star Trek. This was why, on Bonanza, any woman whom a Cartright fell in love with had to die. No loose ends; no obligations; no canonical entanglements.)
I call this the “Damage Control” theory of writing. Always patch up any hole you have poked in the premise.
This is why some ordinary Joe with no knowledge of astronomy or astronautics has to join the crew at the last minute. Otherwise, such conversations would inevitably end with “Why are we discussing this now?”
Seriously, there was never any shortage of technobabble experts on Star Trek. Their number seemed to grow exponentially with each new iteration of the show.
Trinopus, that is why I’ve always subscribed to the Isaac Asimov school of SF writing: Don’t explain how it works, just assume that it does work, and get on with the story. Because, ultimately, the story is the most important thing.
I love Star Trek, and Star Wars, and numerous other SF universes, and I could give fuck-all as to how everything works. I’m interested in the story and the characters.
“Technobabble” is the reason I could never get into Tom Clancy. I tried reading “The Hunt for Red October”, and after 1000 pages of Clancy describing every single dial and gauge and lever in the submarine control room, I had to put the book down and go read something else. I was all, “Get on with the fucking story!” (I did eventually come back and finish the book, but I was disinclined toward reading any more Clancy.)
Star Wars and Star Trek TOS were my introduction to SF in general; Asimov was my introduction to SF writing, when I was 12-14 years old. I devoured all of the Asimov I could get my hands on, and I’m confident that I’ve read every work of fiction Asimov ever published (aside from a couple Black Widowers collections that I’ve missed).
Of course, Asimov wrote the same way I do (or rather, I guess I write the same way he did): No pre-planning and outlines. Just start writing and see where the story ends up.
Patrick Stewart himself said, in the special features on one of the X-Men DVDs that “I don’t even like science fiction, yet my career is littered with science fiction roles.” He went on to explain that he ultimately took those roles because of the story and the characters.
He certainly was one of the greats. His non-fiction, science-fact collections of essays are also good, and worthwhile reading even to this day (although further developments are making them more and more obsolete.)
He was also emphatic about clarity of writing. You never find yourself confused by an Asimov passage.
Asimov also proved that you can write SF mysteries, something John Campbell had said was impossible. (Campbell thought that the protagonist would just invent a widget that solved the mystery…showing that he never really groked the whole idea in the first place!)
(And Randall Garrett wonderfully proved that you can write fantasy mysteries, too!)
[Commodore Decker whiny voice] Don’t you think I know that?! [/CDwv]
That reminds me of a story Lalla Ward (the second Romana on Doctor Who) told. She’d been in the BBC’s Hamlet as Ophelia, with Patrick Stewart as Claudius. (He would play Claudius again in another adaptation, with another Doctor Who actor–David Tennant as Hamlet.)
Some time afterward, in the late seventies/early eighties, she ran into Patrick again and they caught up. Lalla told Patrick she was working in Doctor Who now. He replied, “The only real acting is with the RSC…why would you want to do science fiction?”
Of course, a few years later… (I don’t know if Lalla ever got the chance to tease him about it.)
Much worse!
Yeah … like The Prime Directive. :smack:
Tsk! You should try reading The Sum of All Fears sometime. I love the book, but I swear, about a third of the way through it I found a sentence so convoluted it actually made no sense at all! :smack:
I wish there were more Lord Darcy books. They also add in a pastiche, with lots of other sleuths making guest appearances, such as 007, Wolfe & Archie, etc.
While I agree that you shouldn’t explain how stuff works, you had better know how stuff works or else you can write yourself into a contradiction. And get the subset of sf readers who do care how stuff works pissed at you.
In a sense the techno-babble on TNG is realistic, considering how far in the future they are. Imagine someone from 1900 who came forward in time and listened to two random people discussing their smartphones. It would sound like utter technobabble, though the people would have no clue about the real internal workings of their phones.
Heh:
Yes! Definitely amusing and clever that way! (The books are also informative and educational regarding medieval/renaissance rules of heraldry, address, court etiquette, and so on.)
I presume you do know about Michael Kurland’s “Lord Darcy” books – but it never hurts to give 'em a plug. They aren’t quite as good as Garrett’s – who the hell could be? But they’re darn good fun.
Gene Roddenberry himself, in his original pitch to the network for ST, noted that Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke didn’t explain how his six-shooter worked before ventilating the bad guys - he just picked it up and fired it.