There better have been...or else my dad would have had to explain where he went to work everyday for thirty years.
Don't ask what he did there. I got the 'Daddy can't tell you what he does all day' speech when I was a little girl.
Science, History and Writing for Trek
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
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There better have been...or else my dad would have had to explain where he went to work everyday for thirty years.
Don't ask what he did there. I got the 'Daddy can't tell you what he does all day' speech when I was a little girl.
Well, sometimes a story has to make concessions to reality, either for plot/dramatic reasons or for logistical reasons (for instance, The 100 isn't shot anywhere near the real Mt. Weather, wherever that is), and we just have to buy the conceit that the story is in an alternate world that's almost like ours except for certain details. For instance, in Arthur C. Clarke's classic novel The Fountains of Paradise, the book that popularized the idea of space elevators, he set the story on the island of Taprobane, which was like his adopted home of Sri Lanka in every way except that it was a few hundred kilometers further south, putting it on the equator so that it could be a space elevator anchor. He had to make that one tweak to reality to make the story work, but it was a deliberate choice, not the result of poor research (since, after all, he lived there).
The whole Mount Weather thing isn't really a nitpick. It's more of an inside joke sort of thing among those of us who live here. We've seen 'it' in movies and TV shows before and none of them have come close. XXX, the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still...none of them have gotten it right but it's nice to see them keep on trying.
Heh. I have a B.A. in English that's older than most of the posters here. I was so bad at algebra in high school that the nuns decided I didn't have the intelligence to take physics, so they shunted me into home ec. I learned how to sew (helpful when I made my own wedding dress out of $15 worth of curtain fabric) and where the forks go in a formal place setting. Very useful.
Star Trek comes with a built-in technology (which, by the TNG era became technobabble), so a writer can either coast on that or at least start with it and learn more. If Asimov and Jesco von Puttkamer told Roddenberry something would work, that was good enough for me. AFAIK, Roddenberry didn't have a science degree, either.
I was also fortunate enough early in my Trek-writing career to get a fan letter from an astrophysicist, who had found an error in one of my books and wanted to point it out to me. He and a few others have been my "go-to" people for "What if I had a planet in a binary system where such-and-such happened once every century...?"
Then there's this magical thing called the Internet, which is at once a time-saver (no need to schlep to the library and hope no one's stolen the reference book I need) and a time-waster. There are rabbit holes of information leading out of information into bizarre side topics into...well, we all know how that goes.
So I am the Great Fake. It's why I concentrate on character stories and What-ifs? I'm not formally trained in history, either, but I dabble in it now that I have the maturity to appreciate it, and I love weaving human history into alien cultures. And my Day Job has given me access to a lot of medical information, so I'll use that, too.
I'm told Mick Jagger can't read music. MWB can't do physics. Make of that what you will.
Not anything terribly new here. A lot of the original writers for TOS were not exactly hard-SF guys: Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, etc. I'm sure they did their homework as necessary, but they were hired for their storytelling abilities, not their scientific expertise.
But Roddenberry also had Harvey P. Lynn and Kellam De Forest to help him with research on the technical stuff -- and on TMP he brought in Jesco von Puttkamer (an actual NASA rocket scientist, whose memo about how warp drive worked anticipated Miguel Alcubierre's 1994 physics breakthrough by 16 years, using the same basic model but without the detailed math), Isaac Asimov, and astronaut Rusty Schweickart for the spacewalk scenes. And on TNG, he had Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda vetting the science and engineering, plus the later seasons and shows had on-staff science advisors like Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis. The advantage of a large staff is that you can have people who specialize in story and people who specialize in the technical stuff. It's not like you have to choose one over the other.
You do have more leeway in changing history, as time travel and as-then-unknown historical "facts" (such as Flint's multiple IDs) can alter things permanently (Trials and Tribble-ations) or temporarily (The City on The Edge of Forever). But you need to know what really happened before you can make something different happen.
Incidentally, here's the fanfic I was referring to earlier. http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/bioh...of-the-enterprise-and-gets-in-trouble.282507/
Do you guys have a central Trek Bible?
There's not a big book in a vault at CBS containing secrets unknown to the general public, no. We rely on the same references materials everyone else has: the official guides and encyclopedias, websites, and, most of all, the original episodes and movies. The latter are the only final authorities.
The one exception: sometimes, back in the day, if we had to start writing the novels before the latest spin-off hit the air, we might be provided with an early "bible" for DS9 or VOYAGER. But these documents tended to be only about fifteen pages long, just enough to introduce the basic concepts and characters, and we're quickly superseded by the actual shows once the series were up and running.
The original "bible" for VOYAGER, as I recall, called the EMH "Doc Zimmerman" and described Tuvok as an elderly Vulcan who acted as a mentor to B'Elanna. Obviously, that bible was not infallible.
And the DS9 bible just introduced the set-up and a basic diagram of the station. There was nothing in it about the Founders or the Dominion or any of that. As far as I know, that was all invented later.
It would still be nice to see some more hard-ish scifi in Trek. The Borg and Khan's people are pretty good as samples of Star Trek facing off against aspects of technological singularity, but the rejection comes off more like a gut reaction. I'm curious what Peter Watts, Charles Stross, or Liu Cixin would do with a Star Trek story.
I remember reading a TNG book which was obviously written without ever having seen any episodes because the characterizations are off base. It is pretty interesting to think it might have been written only with a bible since despite the lack of knowledge the characters are still pretty close to TV and end up as an interesting take.There's not a big book in a vault at CBS containing secrets unknown to the general public, no. We rely on the same references materials everyone else has: the official guides and encyclopedias, websites, and, most of all, the original episodes and movies. The latter are the only final authorities.
The one exception: sometimes, back in the day, if we had to start writing the novels before the latest spin-off hit the air, we might be provided with an early "bible" for DS9 or VOYAGER. But these documents tended to be only about fifteen pages long, just enough to introduce the basic concepts and characters, and we're quickly superseded by the actual shows once the series were up and running.
The original "bible" for VOYAGER, as I recall, called the EMH "Doc Zimmerman" and described Tuvok as an elderly Vulcan who acted as a mentor to B'Elanna. Obviously, that bible was not infallible.
And the DS9 bible just introduced the set-up and a basic diagram of the station. There was nothing in it about the Founders or the Dominion or any of that. As far as I know, that was all invented later.
There is also Janeway's The Captain's Table story which I believe came late enough that there were already a few seasons out, yet it seems as if the author never watched an episode, and only skimmed a list for names, nothing else. It's actually one of the best Captain's Table stories despite its utter inaccuracy. There is no reason the story couldn't work with accurate Trek knowledge, but I still wonder if the author would have been hampered by knowing how warp drive normally works in the show, and whether they would have realized Trek has room for all sorts of drives.
I can't speak for the writers, but I use Memory Alpha when I want to look a Trek fact up. There is also Memory Beta for Trek novel and comic book facts.
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The original "bible" for VOYAGER, as I recall, called the EMH "Doc Zimmerman" and described Tuvok as an elderly Vulcan who acted as a mentor to B'Elanna. Obviously, that bible was not infallible.
Similarly, in the initial TNG bible, Riker was called "Bill" and was prejudiced against Data. Data's name rhymed with "that-a," he was described as having an East Asian or Pacific Islander appearance, and he was built by mysterious aliens to store the memories of hundreds of dead colonists (not just their journals and logs as in "Silicon Avatar," their actual memories). Geordi was liaison with the ship's children (and probably read them a lot of books, I guess). And Worf... didn't exist.
I don't know if this was part of Voyager's 'bible' but I remember McNeil saying that way back, in the beginning, the pilot was supposed to be a bit older and the Captain a bit younger and they were supposed to have a 'thing'. I don't know if they wanted Larcano at that point or what they wanted to do with him but it was already established that the character was a pilot.
I've found this website useful for tech info recently as I've been researching something for a fan fic I'm planning:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org
I'm thinking the rise of TV series on DVD/Bu-Ray and services must have made thinga lot easier for you guys.
So what did the writers do if they wanted to double check a reference or refresh their memory of something before all of the shows were easily available on VHS, DVD, ect?
Well, I remember when I could ask my editor to send me a VHS tape of an episode I needed to rewatch. (And you won't believe this about VHS, but I was stunned at how crisp and clear the image quality was compared to my UPN affiliate's signal.) Before then, you could probably request a script. And there were various reference books as well.
I started writing in the VHS era, so that was slightly before my time, although it could still be a challenge to track down a specific episode back before Amazon and ebay. Mostly I relied on the usual reference books, the various Companions and Encyclopedias and Technical Manuals and episode guides, as well as STAR TREK: THE MAGAZINE, which featured new diagrams and technical briefings every issue. (I still have a complete set of those magazine which I consult regularly.)
Pocket Books also had copies of all the scripts on file. In a pinch, if I really needed to know something specific, I could call and ask them to look it up for me, or maybe fax me the relevant page, or maybe even FedEx a photocopy to me, but I seldom abused this privilege.
And, of course, we would pick each other's brains. A bunch of us Trek writers used to meet for lunch every Wednesday at this one diner in Manhattan, where a fair amount of brainstorming got done. We met on Wednesdays because that's when the new comic books come out, of course, so we would all swing by the nearest comic book shop every lunch.
As someone who watched TV on Channel 25 for years, yes I do believe it. A station with such a believable rumor that they were run out of a guy's basement they had to address it on their website's FAQ!
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