How Much Technobabble Should You Use in Science Fiction?
I love Science Fiction, and Science Fiction loves technobabble almost as much as it likes green space lasers. This is about how much technobabble you should use in science fiction without losing readers.
This is another post in a series on How Much in writing:
- How much blood you need in a crime novel.
- How much sex you need in a sex scene.
- How much it costs to write a book.
- How much detail you need in a novel.
- How much profanity you need in a novel.
- How much magic you need in a fantasy novel
- How much story you need in a short story.
- How much technobabble you need in science fiction.
In this post we’re talking about ‘how much technobabble should you use in science fiction (SF)?’
Here is a post from an expert SF fan on how not to make your space fiction audience roll their eyes at your dialogue! So, let us get the amount of technobabble just right.
How Much Technobabble Should You Use in Science Fiction?
What Is Technobabble?
It’s a kind of language or jargon that is used in SF to explain complicated or futuristic events in a story. It sounds scientific but isn’t science. It just makes the story’s unbelievable machines or unlikely natural phenomena seem almost believable.
Rule Of Thumb:
It should always follow the formula: ‘If we X then we Y.’
Why Do We Need Technobabble? Why Not Just Pure Science?
Well presumably you are writing fiction, and don’t want to be limited to just what has been proven beyond a believable doubt. And, frankly, you can’t know what is real science and what is just a theory.
Why? Because no matter how much you know you can’t know it all. And, secondly, humanity often gets stuff wrong. Technobabble sounds scientific, but isn’t real science — it just makes the story’s inventions seem believable.
Star Trek’s Heisenberg Compensators – A Perfect Technobabble Solution
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that the more precisely you measure a particle’s position, the less accurately you can know its momentum, and vice versa.
This makes transporters (the things that beam you up) impossible.
So, the writers invented Heisenberg Compensators that ‘compensate’ for this. Now, this is a good solution to the problem, because they never try to explain how this works.
In fact, when Star Trek’s technical advisor, Michael Okuda was asked how the compensator works, he said: ‘It works very well, thank you.’
This gives us a hint that it’s best not to delve too deeply into this subject. At the same time, it does the job of covering up a flaw in the show by hinting that we just have not invented the right device to solve this problem yet.
We use compensators to fix the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. (We use X to fix Y.)
So, what makes good technobabble and what makes cringeworthy technobabble?
Good Technobabble
1. It moves the story forward.
The function is to facilitate unlikely events. Perhaps you need to teleport a person further than you have established is possible. Well then a character says, ‘I have been working on a subspace relay to increase the range…’ It’s not cheating just bending/abusing the rules.
2. It’s internally consistent.
The Martian, Making Water from Hydrogen
‘I’ll burn hydrogen with oxygen to make water.’
[When I burn hydrogen and oxygen I just make explosions. But, in theory, this can work in a controlled manner and even agrees with real-world principles.]
‘Then, I’ll release hydrazine, very slowly, over the iridium catalyst, to turn it into Nâ‚‚ and Hâ‚‚. I’ll direct the hydrogen to a small area and burn it.’ Page 26 The Martian by Andy Weir
3. It sounds plausible to a reasonably intelligent reader.
You don’t have to fool a professor. But, you need to be able to fool a smart 16-year-old. That is to say if a child can ask a simple question and derail your technobabble, then it needs more work.
Bad Technobabble
1. It uses words the writer clearly does not understand.
Doctor Who – ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ (Series 6)
‘I’ve recalibrated the TARDIS matrix to invert the flux field through the secondary trans-dimensional conduits. That should stop the time vortex from unraveling… hopefully.’
Recalibrate means to adjust a variable on a scale. A matrix is a table database in a computer. So, if you change it, it will break the computer. Flux is the rate of movement of something like field particles. So, if you invert flux – are they moving backwards in time? Can you do that just by breaking a computer matrix? Trans and Conduit are redundant. That is a trans-dimensional conduit and just a dimensional conduit are the same thing.
2. It breaks internal logic.
Tom Paris breaks the warp 10 barrier (Star Trek: Voyager – ‘Threshold’ (1996)). So, warp 1 is the speed of light. Warp 10 is infinite speed. So you can’t ever reach warp 10. Thus, there is no way according to the rules of the show that warp 10 is possible.
This says if we go infinitely fast we will be everywhere in the universe at once.
So doesn’t that mean you will crash into something infinitely fast and then just die? Or worse, crash into everything in the universe at the same time? If x then… what even are you trying to do?
- Want to know how warp works? Go here: Warp Factor
- It’s incredibly complicated and also maybe a real thing: Scientists Announce a Physical Warp Drive Is Now Possible. Seriously.
3. It invents too many jargon terms.
If you can’t follow a sentence without re-reading it, then it is not suitable for technobabble.
Here is a bad example:
Farscape – any high-stakes technical scene (paraphrased)
‘If we invert the tachyonic flux through the anti-phase quantum manifold while simultaneously modulating the plasma graviton harmonics in the hyperdrive’s subspace matrix, we might realign the interdimensional phase-locked chrono-vectors—maybe.’
How do we fix it?
‘If we flood the Hyperdrive with tachyons, then the manifold might realign.’
Just keep it simple, use fewer nonsense words and stick to the formula. If we x then we y.
The Last Word
Technobabble can make your world feel lived in and can give fans something to latch on to. But, only if they can understand what you are saying and only if it is not laughably stupid.
Stick to the basic ‘If we X then we Y’ formula and you can’t go wrong.
As long as the X is not ridiculous.
Example: Math is just writing things on a chalkboard. It can’t cause something. Having a person do something is necessary to make something happen. And, your technobabble should cause something to happen.
The Solution: Rodney solves a math problem. That gives him an idea to open a wormhole to a new dimension that can generate power. But oh no the wormhole sends an alternate version of Rodney through it, saying, ‘The subspace distortion crated by the temporal rift was destroying space time in my universe.’
Then we have a plot!
Have fun writing your fun pseudoscience!
Additional Science Fiction Posts:
- The 2 Types Of Science Fiction Plots & How To Write Them
- 5 Great Characters From Science Fiction & What They Represent
- A Quick Start Guide To Writing Science Fiction
- A Complete Glossary Of Terms For Science Fiction Writers
- 101 Sci-Fi Tropes For Writers
- 5 Things You Need To Know To Write Science Fiction
- The 4 Pillars Of Science Fiction
- The Greatest Fictional World Builders Series
Christopher Luke Dean writes and facilitates for Writers Write. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisLukeDean
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Top Tip: Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop.
1 thought on “How Much Technobabble Should You Use in Science Fiction?”
However bad that line from Doctor Who was, your takedown was about ten times worse. A ‘matrix’ can be any kind of framework that gives meaning to what it contains – it’s not just a database term. ‘Flux’ has any number of meanings beyond ‘rate of movement of particles’. And trans-dimensional and dimensional are *not* the same thing, for pity’s sake. What was that about ‘using words the writer plainly doesn’t understand’?
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