> At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
> He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
> "It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
> Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
> La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
> Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
> La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
> Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
> "And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
I genuinely like Stross' books, but sometimes he comes out with blog posts that are so opinionated that I wonder if he just rabble-rousing for the hell of it.
> Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly.
> even though it's the opposite of real SF (a disruptive literature that focuses intently on revolutionary change),
There are many aspects to and levels on which SF functions. One is to explore humanity through a lens of a vastly different society because of technology and how this changed society reflects our own current implicit biases and assumptions. Stross likes to write this type of SF.
Another type of SF is to use very similar sociological and cultural constructs to how we currently function, but use the SF dressing to sneak past people's implicit biases. Want to tell a story about interracial or inter-gender issues, or immigration, or any number of things, without immediately triggering people's cognitive biases about these issues? This type of SF can be good for that. When done well, people accept a premise and the underlying reasoning behind it, and later one think "you know, that's not all that different that this real-life situation", or even don't think that, but it still affects their reasoning and thought process, because you've snuck some rationality past our all to common human cognitive foibles.
I can't imagine Stross doesn't get this, so he has some other reason for taking his stance. Perhaps he thinks the more complex re-imagining of society can do a good enough job for both types, but I don't agree. There are people that just aren't as interested in that stuff, and you lose those people. Also, it's much harder to do (as he notes, it requires a lot of planning and thinking), which means there's likely to be less stories using it, and less people finding a story they like.
IMO, there's definitely a place for both types of SF. Just be aware of which type you're about to consume if you have a preference at that time.
There's a really nice interview with some of the writers about "Tech the tech". Charlie Stross has it on his blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_ha...
> At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
> He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
> "It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
> Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
> La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
> Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
> La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
> Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
> "And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."