Oh you kids and your fetishism with current day reality and the inability to look beyond the very moment we're in right now. Even Star Trek didn't explain much, it just had technobabble hokum that anyone with a modicum of physics education wholly recognised as such. Technobabble hokum isn't an explanation, it's filler. Whether there's technobabble hokum as filler or not is a matter of taste.xlegionx wrote...
It does matter if there's no explanation.
Want an example? Star Trek transporters work because of Heisenberg Compensators. That's the explanation, that's a fine example of technobabble hokum right there. I mean, their lead technical director got a call once from someone asking them how those Heisenberg Compensators work. His reply was to say 'very nicely, thank you' before hanging up the phone. He found that amusing.
Most Star Trek fans are able to recognise what technobabble hokum is. Mass Effect fields are technobabble hokum, biotics is all technobabble hokum. It's all "space magic" at the end of the day, because that's the very definition of something we've imagined that doesn't exist yet. That's what both fantasy and sci-fi are about: something we've imagined that doesn't exist yet. That's the crux.
You may be too young to remember, but "fantasy" as called such is actually a fairly new genre. It used to just be sci-fi. Everything was sci-fi. Dragons, spaceships, laser rifles, and magic could exist within the same space, because it was all sci-fi. That's how things were back then, before things got stratified into much less interesting sub-genres. (Less imaginative ones, at that, since ideas used to be bigger than they are now and fiction used to be wilder and less segmented.)
Fiction is, essentially, to say it: Something that hasn't happened, yet.
So, sci-fi is... deep breath... Things we've imagined that don't exist, happening in scenarios we've imaginedt hat haven't happened. It's sad that I have to teach people this, because this is basically storytelling 101, and I'd like to think that schools should be teaching this sort of thing. This is the cornerstone of fiction, right here. If it's not fiction then it's a documentary of some sort, that's what separates the two. Things that happen in fiction are things that haven't occurred in reality.
As such, if you set something far enough in the future, you cannot explain it. You can fake the explanation, but people educated in the correct fields are going to see right through that and it's going to be embarrassing. Or you can just say "to heck with it" and not explain how things work. You can just throw the odd bit of hokum out and say you're done with it -- and that's exactly how Star Trek is. How much hokum you have is just a matter of taste, but at the end of the day, it is still just hokum.
Look at Doctor Who -- how does a TARDIS work? A TARDIS in and of itself is what you BSN kids would call "space magic" because it can't be explained yet. It's something that we desire in that we'd like to know, and we'd one day like to be able to create it. But you can't explain it according to modern day science. You can't explain it because if you could we'd be building them. So all you can do is put it there as an ideal that one day we might be able to create.
And if anyone asks? All you can do is throw in the hokum. The technobabble. The utter nonsense. And hope that no one is looking too closely. Project Lazarus is no different than Warp Drives, Synthesis is no different than Transporters. And none of this is ever explained. Show me something from Star Trek that stands as an explanation and... well, I'm sorry, I'd just have to laugh at you. It's technobabble hokum, not an explanation.
Again, some people like technobabble hokum, but that is not an explanation. There are no valid explanations in sci-fi. So what, pray tell, do you want? If it's bad for there to be no explanation, then all sci-fi ever written must be awful by your standards.
Sigh.
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