Technobabble

     I was searching for a new science fiction show to watch, and I just tried and failed to start watching Star Trek: Voyager. I've seen a bit of it before, when I was a kid and it was first on the air. I thought it was kind of hokey then, but when I tried it again this last week I thought that maybe I just couldn't appreciate it. There are definitely some things that, as I get older, I start to understand nuances and subtleties. There are some things that could not hold my attention as a kid because as a boy all I wanted were action and adventure (i.e. spaceships shooting each other with lasers and blowing up).
     No, this time, the effect was the exact opposite. Instead of being able to appreciate what my young self was not mature enough to, I am acutely aware of the ridiculousness that my young self was impervious to. I am referring mostly to the technobabble.
     Now, as a writer of science fiction myself, I understand how important technobabble is. It is a staple, not just for the writer who may not be up on all the latest of high-technology and scientific breakthroughs, but also for the reader/viewer. While there is definitely a niche for hard SF where every last line of science must be accurate and possible, most readers find this daunting and more than a little boring. Technobabble helps you breeze past the cumbersome details and get to what is important. For most of us, it's not important what part of the spaceship engine failed and for what reason; we just need to know the ship's broken, and the crew needs to fix it within the next 22-45 minutes. That's where the drama and the excitement is, not in the technical manual that would be needed to outline the exact science.

Maybe I just need to watch with this in hand.

     But Star Trek has elevated technobabble beyond and art form and into the realm of the surreal. It's like the writers were having a contest to see who could write the longest sentence without using any actual English words. The technobabble is so persistent that it is consistently used as a deus ex machina. What's that? You're stuck in the time-dilation loop on the event horizon of a singularity? Why don't we just use a tachyon beam to open a subspace rift and then convert the magnetrons to produce a graviton field to push us through? It's so obvious.
     Now, my wife has pointed out that Trekkies take this technobabble so seriously that it actually is a necessary part of the show, and that many of these terms must be used correctly or else there will be angry letters. I can understand this in some ways; any science-fiction franchise is going to have some staple technobabble that has become cannon and must therefore stay with the show. Even if this technobabble was coined decades ago, and now what we start to understand about science does not agree. 
     I get it, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. I got through all ten seasons of Stargate, despite the fact that Sam Carter's was a "scientist" in the sense that she was the resident expert on everything from chemistry to computer science to astrophysics, and that she clearly did her docotorate on Making Things Overload and Explode. But I don't think I'm going to be able to get through Star Trek and all its dilithium crystals and magical technology that can make anything out of thin air.
     And don't even get me started on the "aliens"...