I09 led me to a post by Ian Sales about the dreaded Info Dump:
Unless the writer has chosen to use an outsider as a protagonist – a common trick in fantasy, but much less so in science fiction – the only way the reader is going to learn anything about the world of the story is through info dumps. There are elegant and inelegant ways of info dumping. Having one character tell it to another character, who already knows it, is a particularly bad way. Nor is it unique to science fiction – see chapter two of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker for an especially clumsy example. Other techniques include footnotes, excerpts from a “Galactic Encyclopaedia”, or – and this is generally considered to be the only real way to do it – streamlining the exposition into the narrative.
This is more or less true, but there are is an issue I would like to address about this. First and foremost is this isn’t a SFnal problem, it is a literary problem. I hear people cry, “But, Mr. Swann, SF deals worlds and technologies that don’t exist yet, the reader knows nothing about them, thus the Info Dump is a particular hazard uniquely affecting SF.” To which I answer, how many bestselling mainstream books deal with places and environments the reader is probably unfamiliar with? How many historical novels? Tell me that someone writing a spy novel set in rural China is not in danger of Info Dumping.
This is, in fact, one of the strengths of SF, rather than a weakness. Because of the long struggle with this issue (it is particularly problematic in SF, just not uniquely to SF) good SF prose has incorporates a lot of tricks to, as Sales says, “streamlining the exposition into the narrative.” Here’s a short, random, non-comprehensive list of tools in the sfnal toolbox.
- Extreme Brevity. Slipping a fact inside the present action of the story so it is nearly subliminal, a sentence or even a single word can speak volumes about the environment. The classic Heinlein example, “The door dilated.” Use the connotations of your words to imply things about the world. When Greg Bear uses the term “hellcrown” you already have an idea of what it looks like and what it might do.
- Immediate Relevance. Exposition is short, and only brought up at the point where it has an effect on the story.
- Anticipation. Lost is the epitome of this little tool. Little, if any, information about its universe is just given away. The narrative is peppered with clues and hints, implications and inferences, to the point where every factual revelation is a dramatic high point. The exposition turns from medicine to candy.
- Momentum. Watch Terminator again and ignore the 80’s hair. Look at when we find out the whole backstory the first time. It is in the middle of a chase scene after a third of a movie’s worth of exposition. The scene is masterfully paced so that the expository lump occurs right when there’s room for a breather, and the action picks up right afterward.
- Emotion. Every interrogation scene is expository. Information becomes drama when one character doesn’t want to reveal it, or another character doesn’t want to hear it.
