24th Century Technobabble in the 23rd Century

[Flogiston]

So I'm reading the Original Series Gateways book, and I'm finding it rather distracting how many of the science fiction elements feel much more like they belong in the TNG era. I realize that visions of the future change and modern technology has advanced far beyond what was available in the sixties, but it can take me out of the narrative a bit when Spock and Scotty are dealing with nanites, optical data networks, and the like. On the one hand, a TOS book featuring Iconian gateways is already NextGentrified to some extent. On the other, the jarring jargon is made all the worse by the fact that the book is a direct sequel to That Which Survives. I had been waffling back and forth between posting about this, and then I came across a reference to synthehol!

Does this kind of thing bother anybody else? Are there other instances you can recall of this sort of "anachronism"? Conversely are there examples of some of the archaic futurism from TOS in modern Treklit--does Kirk still use tapes?

 

[Stevil2001]

Whenever I wrote a TOS-era story, I used the term "electronic clipboard" to describe this device, like the novels of my youth (Duane's, I think): http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD?file=TOS_PADD_1.jpg

Some copy editor always changed it to "data slate," which is an ugly word and I hate it.

But Susan Wright was terrible for that kind of thing--it's her TOS Badlands story where Kirk actually uses a comm badge!

 

[Flogiston]

One other thing I find myself really enjoying is when the tech in TrekLit very much reflects the era in which it was created. I'm reading Spock's World right now and found myself smiling at the Enterprise's BBS and its SysOps.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Why are you smiling? TrekBBS is a board. Maybe not a direct-dial-in board like the one I used to connect to from my Tandy 1000 (I forget the name, but I seem to recall that it was run by UC Irvine, as a free public service, and it had what, at the time, was a popular series of "spoiler reviews" of Star Trek episodes, and a lively ST discussion forum), but then, do you really think the boards that were essential plot elements of several Diane Duane novels were primitive direct dial-in?

 

[Christopher]

What bugged me about the TOS Gateways book was its use of a transporter biofilter as a plot point. That's a technology that wasn't supposed to be around until the TNG era, or at least after the TOS era. If they'd had biofilters in TOS, then a number of disease-related episodes probably wouldn't have happened.

 

[20fridge]

^Perhaps in TOS the biofilter could only filter known diseases. IIRC most of the TOS disease episodes were ones Starfleet hadn't encountered.

 

[Idran]

The biofilter always only filters known diseases, I'm pretty sure. You don't want to risk a false positive with something like that, after all; it's not like an overeager heuristic-based virus scanner has never accidentally IDed a legitimate file. And I don't think there are even distinguishing facets between a beneficial microorganism and a detrimental one; you couldn't heuristically determine the difference between, say, e.coli as part of your gut flora and e.coli as part of food poisoning, because there is no difference in the organisms themselves, just in terms of their long-term interactions with your body.

Plus "Realm of Fear" certainly made it sound as though you had to specifically encode the signatures of known microbes to filter them out.

 

[Christopher]

^Perhaps in TOS the biofilter could only filter known diseases. IIRC most of the TOS disease episodes were ones Starfleet hadn't encountered.

"Requiem for Methuselah." Rigellian fever. Also choriocytosis from "The Pirates of Orion."

 

[20fridge]

Those could be a recombinant strains... The particular strain of Rigellian fever in "Requiem for Methuselah seemed oddly virulent to be something that would have been around for a while. From an evolutionary perspective the most successful diseases are not the plagues that kill many people all at once. Those tend to burn out, like the Spanish flu. The more successful diseases are the ones which keep the host alive long enough to spread. So, perhaps the biofilter just wasn't equipped to deal with new strains of familiar diseases.

 

[Idran]

Or there wasn't a biofilter in the 23rd century and that one single reference to it in that one story just screwed up.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Does this kind of thing bother anybody else? Are there other instances you can recall of this sort of "anachronism"?

Yes. Drives me nuts. I hate it when an author or a fan makes a reference to Kirk leading an "away team" instead of a "landing party." And the use of a counselor on Star Trek Continues keeps me from fully investing in that series.

The TNG-style technobabble at the beginning of Generations bugs me, too. It just sounds wrong coming out of Scotty's mouth.

 

[Kemaiku]

Yes. Drives me nuts. I hate it when an author or a fan makes a reference to Kirk leading an "away team" instead of a "landing party."

Seriously?

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Seriously?

Yep. it takes me out of the story.

 

[Kemaiku]

Right. A tiny little thing like that ruins stories with magical faster than light ships and aliens.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Right. A tiny little thing like that ruins stories with magical faster than light ships and aliens.

...Is there a reason you're attempting to debate me on my personal opinion?

 

[Flogiston]

Why are you smiling? ... do you really think the boards that were essential plot elements of several Diane Duane novels were primitive direct dial-in?

Nah, I actually like the idea that a starship has a public messaging board. It's the terminology--the jargon, that gives me flashbacks of the 80's. Nowadays, sysops are admins, and Kirk might've been checking his feed instead of the BBS.

 

[Kemaiku]

Terminology is just a matter of production era. Enterprise showed us how many standard Trek elements existed in the 22nd century over 100 years before Kirk took command of his Enterprise.

Terms and tehcnology might vary a little between ships but there's little reason to create a fuss over minor terms when the larger story is what matters.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Terminology is just a matter of production era. Enterprise showed us how many standard Trek elements existed in the 22nd century over 100 years before Kirk took command of his Enterprise.

Terms and tehcnology might vary a little between ships but there's little reason to create a fuss over minor terms when the larger story is what matters.

I'm not really "creating a fuss." It's something that throws me out of a story because the terminology is wrong for the era, the same as if a character in the 1940s said something like, "Sweet ride, bro!" And if the author got little things like that wrong, they likely got the big things wrong, too.

Again, this is my personal opinion, which the original poster asked us for. I've never said that it should bother you, too.

 

[Kemaiku]

Wrong for the era as in the correct term hadn't been coined yet, and when it was, was used for the remainder of the series.

The same as Dilithium over Lithium, not going on about 1960's circuits from the 80's onwards, shields instead of deflectors. It took time to work it all out. It's not really worth worrying over such little things.

 

[Idran]

But using the terminology of TOS helps to capture the feel of the setting even if it wasn't held to by later works. It's like how Christopher's "The Darkness Drops Again" used some tech terminology that was pretty much specific to WNMHGB in order to capture the same feel of that episode. Or how Greg Cox specifically chose phrasings from "The Cage" to make "Child of Two Worlds" have a similar feel to that stuff. It's set dressing, sure, but good set dressing in a work of fiction can add to immersion and bad set dressing can break it, especially if it's a kind of set dressing that you happen to be personally interested in. For a non-Trek example, 99% of people would have absolutely no conscious idea the tremendous level of versimilitude Matt Weiner went to in Mad Men for the smallest details, but that doesn't mean it was wasted effort because it contributed to immersion on a subtextual level.

It has absolutely nothing to do with how realistic the work is as compared to real life, the two are completely orthogonal concepts and there's nothing contradictory about one bringing you out of a work and the other not.

Also, even all this aside, since when do pet peeves have to make sense? Everyone's got some little thing that's pointless from an objective view but that bugs them personally. And just because someone else has a peeve that you don't doesn't mean there's any reason to try and get them to stop having that peeve. Folks have different priorities.