The Transporter Problem in Writing

I think everybody is familiar with the transporters in Star Trek. We convert matter (humans) to energy, send that energy along a beam, and re-convert to matter at the other end. What I'm interested in is why that came to be and the implications for writing.

The original Star Trek series was filmed on a tight budget. Too tight (at least in Season 1) for the production crew to build a shuttle model. But they needed a way to get the crew to the surface of the planet, so they decided to use a cheap camera trick. It was never intended to be a permanent thing, and nobody at the time thought much about it.

Here's the problem - transporter tech means nobody who beams down to a planet ever needs to die! Redshirt #2 beams down, gets his "he's dead, Jim," line, then Scotty just pulls the last copy out of the transporter buffer. Redshirt #2 is told "you died," he says "I hate when that happens, what's for dinner in the chow hall tonight?"

I participated in a writer's workshop at a con over the weekend. One of the writers had a submission set in a world he built. What he wanted was a simple way to play with alternate histories. What he got was a world in which the mere existence of the world made his plot equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Sometimes when we writers build a world, the world gets away from us.