The Exposition Brunch

[marydell]

Sometime I would like to see a group of characters in an SF novel sit down and have a meal that doesn't consist mainly of giant barbequed hunks of exposition. It's like there's a rule: if an author wants to have someone deliver a tedious speech explaining how the in-story government, water plant, or FTL drive works, it's copacetic as long as everybody's eating.


(Why yes, I *am* reading Heinlein at the moment!)

Comments

[seawasp]

You'd prefer the barbequed exposition while they're in the middle of combat, then.

[geekosaur]

There's always the dinner in A Civil Campaign....

[geekosaur]

Heinlein can give you barbecued exposition in pretty much any context.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

As we dance, to the ex-po-si-tion-tan-go, ba-dum!

/lehrer

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Is Steven Brust disqualified for being technically fantasy?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Ideally, I like exposition to be delivered by Nero Wolfe in the office over drinks...

The dinner thing annoys me because it's coy. It's a way of getting the characters to sit still so there can be an expository lump, while the author pretends they're depicting character interaction. I prefer honest expository lumps, preferably delivered direct to the reader a la Larry Niven.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I have heard good things about that book...it's in my list, although a bit of a ways down.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Brust's food is practically a character itself.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Totally! Brust does use meals to very good effect, but even if he put expo-lumps in there I wouldn't notice as much. Usually fantasy exposition doesn't bother me (although I did bail out of the Harry Potter series after one too many explanations of Quidditch). With magic in the mix, there's enough handwavium to make the rest of it easy to swallow.

Note: I like reading "hard" SF, so I am getting what I deserve, pretty much.

[celestialsoda.livejournal.com]

LOL, yis.

[seawasp]

These days the editors try to discourage you from Just Expository Lump and WANT you to deliver it disguised as something else.

And to me "in the office over drinks" differs only in window-dressing from "at the table while eating". With Nero Wolfe, of course, you're in a PI-type mystery novel, and Barbequed Exposition is expected and essentially NECESSARY at the end. Even more so with Wolfe, because he likes the sound of his own voice and loves declaiming at length.

Note that Archie Goodwin was one of the models from which I drew Jason Wood.

[readinggeek451]

That's the first thing I thought of, too.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think the dinnertable thing particularly sticks out to me because it offers an opportunity to go on for pages & pages, often about politics, while absolutely nothing is happening beside possibly passing the salt. It's pretty much context free, so it makes for a particularly obvious sort of exposition, and always reminds me of "The Book" in 1984.

Infodumps with appropriate context don't bother me - one character explaining a stillsuit to another while said stillsuit is being put on, for example, or explaining how the ship works while said ship is being boarded. Those seem natural and are limited to the subject at hand.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Several of the characters would probably have been much happier if that dinner had consisted of exposition...

[geekosaur]

That was where the ellipsis was leading, actually. :)