Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technobabble

[captcalhoun]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

aside from CLB, many of the SCE writers. specifically, Mack, KRAD, Wardilmore and Heather Jarman.

 

[SicOne]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I suppose one of the questions that logically follows this discussion is, has Christopher's reliance upon real-world physics and modern (i.e. late 20th/early 21st century) theories (such as those discussed in Watching The Clock) set the bar higher for Trek writers overall, in terms of coming up with more plausible explanations for things that occur in TrekLit, rather than falling back on tired old technobabble?

 

[Timo]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

...On the other hand, shouldn't "modern" theories by definition be considered anachronistic for all of the Trek eras? If a character is fond of the steampunk of his or her era, or otherwise takes pleasure in being old-fashioned, then by all means have him or her refer to what is known of the universe today in the language used today. But a regular Joe or Jane or Jem'Hadar should probably only obliquely and dismissively refer to the cutting edge ideas of today. That is, "what they used to call a superstring" might do in a pinch - but "Murasaki effect" sounds much more believable than "intermediate-mass X-ray binary signature" coming from the mouth of a Star Trek hero, even when the former is technobabble and the latter is real scientific lingo!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I suppose one of the questions that logically follows this discussion is, has Christopher's reliance upon real-world physics and modern (i.e. late 20th/early 21st century) theories (such as those discussed in Watching The Clock) set the bar higher for Trek writers overall, in terms of coming up with more plausible explanations for things that occur in TrekLit, rather than falling back on tired old technobabble?

I did notice that "Indistinguishable From Magic" had ideas about time travel at odds with "Watching the Clock". So, maybe not.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I did notice that "Indistinguishable From Magic" had ideas about time travel at odds with "Watching the Clock". So, maybe not.

Actually David McIntee and I compared notes about our respective books early in the writing process, and some of my ideas in WTC (particularly about the rarity of slingshot effects) were influenced by those discussions. So there shouldn't be any fundamental contradictions, beyond nuances of interpretation. (Keep in mind that some of the time-travel concepts in IFM were merely alleged by a character who was not only drunk at the time, but who might have been deliberately obfuscating things because he was speaking to someone from centuries in his past.)

 

[Lonemagpie]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I suppose one of the questions that logically follows this discussion is, has Christopher's reliance upon real-world physics and modern (i.e. late 20th/early 21st century) theories (such as those discussed in Watching The Clock) set the bar higher for Trek writers overall, in terms of coming up with more plausible explanations for things that occur in TrekLit, rather than falling back on tired old technobabble?

I did notice that "Indistinguishable From Magic" had ideas about time travel at odds with "Watching the Clock". So, maybe not.

That's deliberate, as I see Christopher has noted- I didn't want to pre-empt his stuff, and the stuff that the Dominic Kent character says is filtered through the facts that he's a) almost certainly trying *not* to give entirely accurate information, considering who he's talking to and why, and b) totally drunk out of his skull.

But then when you get to the *actual* stuff that happens, there's real science again! But there's also made-up stuff too, cos, y'know, it's what "fiction" means.

TBH, though, there are almost as many ideas about how time works and how time travel might work, as there are scientists studying it- it seems to be a case of "wait another week and there'll be another theory/explanation"

 

[Idran]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

...On the other hand, shouldn't "modern" theories by definition be considered anachronistic for all of the Trek eras? If a character is fond of the steampunk of his or her era, or otherwise takes pleasure in being old-fashioned, then by all means have him or her refer to what is known of the universe today in the language used today. But a regular Joe or Jane or Jem'Hadar should probably only obliquely and dismissively refer to the cutting edge ideas of today. That is, "what they used to call a superstring" might do in a pinch - but "Murasaki effect" sounds much more believable than "intermediate-mass X-ray binary signature" coming from the mouth of a Star Trek hero, even when the former is technobabble and the latter is real scientific lingo!

Timo Saloniemi

But...that's not how science works. We still talk about Newtonian stuff in the macroscopic realm using pretty much the same language as centuries ago.

There are no anachronisms in science except when things are proven wrong, and terminology wouldn't change just based on what's popular or in fashion.

I mean, have you read Watching the Clock? It's a perfect example of how you can blend Star Trek-esque stuff like you're talking about with actual science and have it sound awesome.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

Writing hard SF is about presenting the most plausible extrapolation of the future that you can based on current understandings of science. Yes, there's a risk that it will end up sounding dated to future audiences; I've read some rigorous hard SF from earlier eras that comes off as rather silly to modern eyes. But random technobabble that sounds silly to present-day readers is still going to sound silly in the future. So you're still better off staying consistent with modern understandings; that way you at least satisfy your present audience (that segment that's science-savvy, which is the target audience for hard SF), and your chances of still sounding valid in the future are at least somewhat better.

Because while some current theories will surely be rendered obsolete, others will still be used thousands or millions of years from now, because they're already right. If it's an area of science we don't yet know a lot about, like dark matter or quantum gravity or life on other planets, then yeah, virtually any SF prediction is likely to be rendered obsolete sooner or later. But if it's something solidly verified by experiment and used in practice on a daily basis, like the laws of thermodynamics or general relativity, then it's a safe bet it'll still be used in the future, because it's simply how the universe works. (And yes, general relativity does have everyday practical applications. GPS navigation systems depend on comparing the slight relativistic differences in clock rate between satellites in different orbits.)

Basically, hard SF works much the way science works -- by extrapolating logically and methodically from what is currently known. That's its character as a genre. Whether it's still right 50 years from now is beside the point, because there's no way to predict that for sure or guard against it. Hell, any work of SF set in the future will eventually be contradicted by real events, whether it's new discoveries or unexpected sociopolitical changes or just the calendar catching up. So you can't worry about that. All you can do is project forward from where you are and where your audience is, and try to create a suitably convincing illusion for your audience.

 

[Timo]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

The thing is, our heroes can wear two hats, and neither of them looks good with today's science jargon.

If they are doing the "future scientist" thing, then it makes no real sense for them to delve on ancient science, even if (and especially if) it's known to be absolutely right. There is nothing worthwhile to be discussed about applying Laplacians to Newtonian movement in the 24th century any more.

If they are doing the "space adventurer" thing, then it makes no sense for them to use 21st century science jargon for it. Today's working stiffs don't use science jargon when they apply general relativity or Maxwell's equations in practice, either; they use technical jargon. You don't apply Laplacians on your movement vector - you apply the throttle and the stick. Or if you apply an impulse field, you don't discuss it in terms of 21st century science that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of impulse fields!

The grey area is whether the wording of some "seeming immutables" like today's cosmological theories should remain relevant for when our heroes encounter a cosmological phenomenon, for either of the hats. When our heroes warp in and out of "class 4 singularities", is it reasonable to assume that things like Schwartzschild radius (which works with the assumption that the lightspeed limit is absolute and there's one kind of singularity only) would still hold a significance to them?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captaindemotion]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I'm currently enjoying The Buried Age (which is the first Trek novel I've read in quite some time in fact) and the accessible manner in which Christopher explains quite complex (to me anyway) issues of physics and science is very impressive.

 

[MatthiasRussell]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I think Michael Martin is the most techno-babbly. His books are filled with big words, not just of strange technology but especially with confusing alien names and languages.

Christopher does a good job being techno-babbly but maintain a great reading pace (still love cosmozoan). Martin tends to over-do it and water down his books with too many strange alien and scientific terms. Great technical mind, but I don't think that translates to being a good story teller.

 

[Idran]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

If they are doing the "future scientist" thing, then it makes no real sense for them to delve on ancient science, even if (and especially if) it's known to be absolutely right. There is nothing worthwhile to be discussed about applying Laplacians to Newtonian movement in the 24th century any more.

Seriously, Timo, have you read Watching The Clock? Because it does this in a way that sounds just about perfect, using just enough modern terminology that you can get what they mean while still extrapolating with new terminology that you can pick up just fine in context.

 

[Timo]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I guess I'm currently too much under the influence of the Quantum Thief, which makes a virtue out of terminologically disconnecting everything from today's science and thinking, yet substitutes futuro-babble that is almost instantaneously understandable and can be readily related back to today's concepts... Pseudo-future can be done in two rather distinct ways, I think. Either you get the feel that this is what the future might look like if you got to visit it - or then you get the feel that you are part of the future already, and the thrill is in finding out how you got there.

No, I haven't read Watching the Clock yet, alas. Spotted it on the bookstore last week. And I believe it would be an excellent contrast to Quantum Thief in writing style, which is very good. I absolutely need a reality check now.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

If they are doing the "future scientist" thing, then it makes no real sense for them to delve on ancient science, even if (and especially if) it's known to be absolutely right. There is nothing worthwhile to be discussed about applying Laplacians to Newtonian movement in the 24th century any more.

That makes no sense whatsodamnever. Science isn't about keeping up with current fashion. We still make everyday use of scientific and mathematical formulae that were derived centuries ago, right alongside the newer stuff. And we still use technologies that were invented hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years ago (like fire and string) right alongside the newer stuff. The laws of the universe don't change; we just gradually add to our understanding of them. So of course the laws we discovered centuries ago will still be in use centuries from now, because they'll still be part of how the universe works.

For instance, right now I'm looking at one of the seminal papers on self-consistent time travel, "Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, et al. from 1990, and while it's built mainly around equations from general relativity and Einstein field equations and such, it also references Huygens' principle, an idea first published exactly 300 years earlier in 1690; uses Gauss's law, which was formulated in 1835; and of course relies heavily on calculus as developed by Newton and Liebniz in the late 1600s.

If they are doing the "space adventurer" thing, then it makes no sense for them to use 21st century science jargon for it. Today's working stiffs don't use science jargon when they apply general relativity or Maxwell's equations in practice, either; they use technical jargon. You don't apply Laplacians on your movement vector - you apply the throttle and the stick.

You're confusing theory and practice. The pilot will apply the throttle and the stick, but the engineers designing the ship and the astrophysicists plotting out its course will still need to use the equations that underlie it all. A gunman doesn't need to understand the physics of how a bullet moves through the air or how blood spatters, but the forensic scientists reconstructing the crime do need to understand and use it.

Or if you apply an impulse field, you don't discuss it in terms of 21st century science that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of impulse fields!

But the science pertaining to "impulse fields" will be built on the science of earlier centuries and will incorporate it alongside the new stuff. Because that's how science works. Scientists today still use principles from hundreds of years ago.

The grey area is whether the wording of some "seeming immutables" like today's cosmological theories should remain relevant for when our heroes encounter a cosmological phenomenon, for either of the hats. When our heroes warp in and out of "class 4 singularities", is it reasonable to assume that things like Schwartzschild radius (which works with the assumption that the lightspeed limit is absolute and there's one kind of singularity only) would still hold a significance to them?

The "lightspeed limit" still applies in the Trek universe; warp travel is about bypassing it through general-relativistic alterations of spacetime topology. The Schwarzschild radius was derived from the Einstein field equations, just as warp and wormhole metrics are. They're all outgrowths of the same physics, so there's no contradiction between them. And the Einstein field equations can and do have solutions that produce different types of singularities, for instance, a point singularity, a Kerr ring singularity, or a cosmic string. So just because there are additional types of gravitational singularities known in the future, that doesn't mean that they've stopped using the very physical laws that define singularities in the first place.

 

[captcalhoun]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

ooooh, SNAP.

 

[Timo]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

We still make everyday use of scientific and mathematical formulae that were derived centuries ago

I think there's a slight misunderstanding here. The formulae are in use, yes. Yet the language often is dead and buried.

When science is new and exciting, scientists will insist on coining and using big words and shiny new definitions; it's a natural thing to do, marking the property and all that. Most of that vocabulary is useless in the long run, though, and once a phenomenon is better understood, the excess terminology gets pruned.

Mathematics is abstract enough that people quite plausibly might still speak of "Laplacians" when using them a thousand years from now. Except that mathematics as a Starfleet officer tool should be even more abstract, outsourced and automated, involving no discussion of such "nuts and bolts" - even when the officer in question is an engineer. Any other field of science would be in constant iterative interaction with the world of applications, and old terminology would be quickly replaced by more accurate or useful words. Say, save for the primitive and unevolving application in telescopic terrestrial observations ("rectascension") the language of astronomy from the 18th century no longer survives - or where it does ("planetary nebula" or "nova"), it most definitely should not.

A work of fiction bridging eras can of course take liberties in facilitating the bridging. But works of fiction on Starfleet adventures tend to describe the end users, the people who deal with evolved science on the field and indeed participate in evolving it - and thus it's quite jarring to hear a supposed renaissance man from the 24th century use language that harkens back to the original rinascimento... That's something to spice (or buffer) a scientific paper with, not something to use in tackling a field problem so that the mission will succeed, the ship will be saved, and billions of lives will remain unaffected after all.

If anything, our heroes should be coining new phrases left and right to describe the wonders they see, and establishing bold new concepts that clarify, restructure and replace today's primitive notions (even if such semantic self-glorification perhaps is less common in the natural sciences than in the "unnatural" ones). When they do make use of today's immutables, they shouldn't raise them on the pedestal they hold today, given how old and ho-hum they will be at their time and age. But that's perhaps something for a different scifi realm, as Trek has always given us more entertainment value through anachronisms, through the wonderful sixties-in-space feel...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Destructor]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I think Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens do a really good job with the hard-science stuff in their Trek novels.

+1. This is who I thought of when I read the threat title- I was always very impressed with how they broke down and explained commonly-used, but little-understood, Trek tech tropes.

 

[SicOne]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

We still make everyday use of scientific and mathematical formulae that were derived centuries ago

I think there's a slight misunderstanding here. The formulae are in use, yes. Yet the language often is dead and buried.

When science is new and exciting, scientists will insist on coining and using big words and shiny new definitions; it's a natural thing to do, marking the property and all that. Most of that vocabulary is useless in the long run, though, and once a phenomenon is better understood, the excess terminology gets pruned.

Mathematics is abstract enough that people quite plausibly might still speak of "Laplacians" when using them a thousand years from now. Except that mathematics as a Starfleet officer tool should be even more abstract, outsourced and automated, involving no discussion of such "nuts and bolts" - even when the officer in question is an engineer. Any other field of science would be in constant iterative interaction with the world of applications, and old terminology would be quickly replaced by more accurate or useful words. Say, save for the primitive and unevolving application in telescopic terrestrial observations ("rectascension") the language of astronomy from the 18th century no longer survives - or where it does ("planetary nebula" or "nova"), it most definitely should not.

A work of fiction bridging eras can of course take liberties in facilitating the bridging. But works of fiction on Starfleet adventures tend to describe the end users, the people who deal with evolved science on the field and indeed participate in evolving it - and thus it's quite jarring to hear a supposed renaissance man from the 24th century use language that harkens back to the original rinascimento... That's something to spice (or buffer) a scientific paper with, not something to use in tackling a field problem so that the mission will succeed, the ship will be saved, and billions of lives will remain unaffected after all.

If anything, our heroes should be coining new phrases left and right to describe the wonders they see, and establishing bold new concepts that clarify, restructure and replace today's primitive notions (even if such semantic self-glorification perhaps is less common in the natural sciences than in the "unnatural" ones). When they do make use of today's immutables, they shouldn't raise them on the pedestal they hold today, given how old and ho-hum they will be at their time and age. But that's perhaps something for a different scifi realm, as Trek has always given us more entertainment value through anachronisms, through the wonderful sixties-in-space feel...

Timo Saloniemi

I get what you mean to a limited extent, but do we really want our Trek books filled with too much hard science? No disrespect intended to any of our fine authors, but if I want hard science, I'll read a textbook.

I read Trek to be entertained; if I pick up a little well-intentioned education along the way, that's fine, but it's not why I read Trek. I would venture a guess that most Trek lit readers have at least an average grounding in science if not a slightly more advanced knowledge than the great unwashed. That being said, Trek lit doesn't need to be dumbed down for the masses, but nor does it need to leave me glassy-eyed.

Christopher did what I felt to be, with my layman's knowledge of the subject, an outstanding job explaining many concepts regarding time-travel and the like in DTI...but just as our modern understanding of science has evolved with experimentation, observation and application, just because early twenty-first century fiction writers postulate scientific theories applicable to a fictional universe three centuries hence populated by aliens and warp-capable starships doesn't necessarily mean those same theories based upon real-life science up to this point in time will prevail. There's a reason why they're called theories, because modern science has been unable to prove them as absolutes. Even great scientific minds can only speculate when they cannot prove, because the technology that can offer proof hasn't been developed yet.

Given the geometric rate of our scientific and technological progression over the past century as compared with the entire history of our species, it's entirely possible that we'll have a vastly different understanding of our universe, and how to travel in it, three centuries down the line.

Anyway, not to digress as I did above from the main point, but I don't want my Trek literature to make me feel like a fuckin' idiot. I know what I know, I'm open to some new ideas or new looks at old scientific concepts, but I'm not a physicist nor going to be one nor desire to be one. I read for entertainment.

 

[Sho]

Re: Authors or stories showing a particularly firm command of technoba

I don't really get the "makes me feel like an idiot" sentiment. If a book touches on something I don't know or don't yet understand that doesn't make me an idiot, it just means the author has chosen to invest time in a subject that I haven't. If he communicates it well and I learn from it, that does me a service - it puts his effort at my employ. If he doesn't explain it and requires me to go research it myself, well, at least it can still be an interesting pointer. Part of the reason I'm partial to scifi is precisely because it exposes me to new things and thoughts.