A recent episode of the BBC’s excellent science podcast/radio show Curious Cases took on the theme of “space mysteries”. Rather than its normal format of tackling a single question, it answered multiple space-related queries with the assistance of The Sky At Night hosts George Dransfield, Chris Lintott and Maggie Aderin-Pocock. Good fun all round.
Anyway, while discussing the speeds needed for space travel, Chris Lintott made this claim that tingled my space spidey-senses:
There’s a great story from the early days of Star Trek where Gene Roddenberry the producer got this letter from a fan where they said “Look, I don’t really understand what happened because on episode 1 the shuttles moved at this speed and then three episodes later they could go faster so what is the maximum speed of the shuttle that the Enterprise carries?’ and Rodenberry wrote back and said “It’s very simple. The shuttles travel at the speed of plot”.
This is indeed a pithy response, but did that exchange ever really happen? On checking, it seems not.
It is certainly true that Roddenberry and the Trek team responded diligently to fan mail in the early days of the original show. The official Star Trek site discusses this in a 2021 blog post, noting that the team would occasionally reply in tongue-in-cheek fashion, but generally took a serious approach and would sometimes forward scientifically-themed questions to other experts to see if they could offer additional details. All the letters are stored at the University of California.
However, my searching online doesn’t reveal a single instance of anyone ever quoting Roddenberry directly saying “travel at the speed of plot” in a letter. Given the depth of Trek fan scholarship and the lengthy threads that pop up around this topic on Trek forums, it seems pretty unlikely that this quote wouldn’t constantly be cited if it was indeed documented as part of Star Trek history.
On top of that, the generally reliable TV Tropes site cites the first appearance of this phrase as being in June 2000, uttered not by Roddenberry but by J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and Crusade. Straczynski himself remarked upon this in his Twitter feed back in 2018, calling himself “the guy who coined the phrase that in SF ‘ships travel at the speed of plot’”.
It seems that this commonly used and handy phrase has attracted an apocryphal origin story. Roddenberry is the archetypal sci-fi creator/producer and Star Trek is one of the earliest and most famous TV examples of the genre, so it makes sense his name, rather than Straczynski’s, has been attached to it in typical urban myth fashion.
So sorry Chris, the idea of “travel at the speed at plot” is very useful, but I couldn’t find any evidence that Roddenberry himself ever said it in a fan letter. (If anyone can point to said letter, sound off in the comments and I’ll speedily update this!)
For more historical sci-fi digging, check out the full broadcast history of the Star Wars holiday special in Australia and whether the ABC really did show The Day Of The Triffids on the same day as the BBC.
Gene Roddenberry image: Wikimedia Commons
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