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Treknobabble is a portmanteau of "Star Trek" and "technobabble". It is used humorously by fans of the various Star Trek television series, and disparagingly by its critics, to describe the infamous amount of pseudoscientific gibberish packed into many episodes. The term has escaped Star Trek fandom (and anti-fandom) and has become more commonly used in contexts where useless and incorrect "technical" explanations are given, typically in situations involving various pseudosciences or in science fiction writing. Piller filler is a synonym, a derivative of producer Michael Piller's name. A similar term is wantum physics, a derivative of quantum physics, referring to science that basically accomplishes whatever the writer wants it to accomplish.
Reportedly, writers on The Next Generation and later series would add the tag "<tech>" to portions of the script where they needed some jargon inserted, which would then be assembled by a different set of staff, though this theory is disputed.[1] This somewhat undermines the traditional role of science as the inspiration for plot in science fiction, although the show was always intended to be primarily drama in the space opera style rather than straightforward science fiction.
[edit] In popular culture
- Last Unicorn Games' Star Trek pen-and-paper roleplaying game contains a small list designed to aid the players in the use of Treknobabble; rolling a pair of six-sided dice gives a number (from two to twelve) and by rolling once for each of three columns, a player will construct a three-word 'Treknobabble' phrase (such as "neutrino displacement grid" or "resonating polarizing regulator").
- The song "The USS Make Shit Up" on the Banned on Vulcan EP by Voltaire satirises the over-reliance of Trek writers on resolving plotlines with treknobabble: "Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish/Thats the way we do things, lad/We're making shit up as we wish/The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us/'Cause if we find we're in a bind/We'll just make some shit up".
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