infodump
by uzwi
The very term, and the contempt with which it’s deployed in TV Tropes-style criticism, is designed to doom it from the start as a technique. But an “infodump” is essentially a piece of nonfiction writing. If you never read good nonfiction, or if you think that all nonfiction is the same thing, or has to be boring, or has to take a particular unreadable tone that bores you, you’ll never be able to infodump successfully. The perspectives and voices of good nonfiction are many, and available to anyone who wants to learn them. That also makes them as parodyable as any other kind of discourse. There’s a lot of fun to be had by combining a travel writer’s voice from the 1920s with the voice of a motorcycle manual in the 1960s; or a Vienna Secessionist manifesto with a Himalayan expedition record or the distinctive syntactical lilt of a translated Continental theorist in 1981. There’s a lot of fun to be had by switching the voice and perspective of your implicit narrator as a way of switching the frame and context and managing the reader’s perspective on the events in the text. Do you want to write a landscape into your fantasy novel? Make sure you’re reading landscape writers, not fantasists; you may not want to use the phrase “ruderal scrub”, but you need to know when you’re walking through it. Do you want to do faux-physics? Read the real thing, not your favourite TV Tropes writer’s “clever” fiftieth-hand take on the time travel trope. You’ll need a decent ear for a set of style rules—a poetics of jargon—and a dependable conversion ratio to your own voice; and you’ll have to be aggressive and unapologetic about it, and expect the reader to keep up. Here’s a short frame-switch about switching frames. Is it fiction or nonfiction? Here’s a piece about infodumping by outright list. Is it fiction or nonfiction.
the m john harrison blog 
It reminds me a little of people’s obsession between “showing” and “telling” and the idea that “showing” is the be all and end all. Think Kurt Vonnegut was basically all tell. Being told a story is great if the personality behind it is worth hearing.
Infodumps written in a good style seems like a good way to bypass someone’s cynicism at the start of the story too. Rather than seduce them you’re setting out your stall straightforwardly.
PS hope no news is still good news
True. The one doesn’t rule out the other. In use, they’re both modified and controlled by a lot of factors, including each other. And like fiction/nonfiction their history in contemporary writing has been of a constantly shifting symbiosis. All you’re looking for is fluency, and to keep the reader entertained. Much of immersion vs narration, when it’s expressed as a problem, is just confused definitions. Fossilising ideas like that into rules of thumb for writing popular fiction doesn’t help anyone.
>>Rather than seduce them you’re setting out your stall straightforwardly.
Not sure I’d ever even try to set out my stall straightforwardly, but there you go.
(Yes, by the way: no news is still good news.)
“Infodumping by outright list”: this reminds me of one of my very favorite pages in all of your work, the rundown of entradistas in “Light.” By referencing numerous names and concepts that appear nowhere else in the book or trilogy, it greatly expands the diegesis but only in an allusory, vague way — like names we may have heard on the news but cannot place, places we can’t quite find on the map but that sound rather exotic, or words in a foreign language that we have only mastered imperfectly, the meaning of which we infer from context, if we can even infer it at all (but which, in either case, we don’t bother looking up in the dictionary). It’s infodumping as symbolist poetry.
Another thought, if I may. “But an “infodump” is essentially a piece of nonfiction writing.” What then is Borges’ entire oeuvre (functioning, as he does, in a fictionalized style of nonfiction writing — his short stories read like essays — style which then, only after this detour, he also uses for his nonfiction) — what is it but a huge infodump? There must be readers out there who were frustrated because Pierre Menard didn’t get any dialogue or a character arc.
Hi Andrei
I often thought of myself as sampling some text to be found in the Light universe; or maybe the demonic book that features in one of the precursor stories of the trilogy, “The Gift” (1987). The original idea, back in the days of Viriconium, was to assemble just as many fragments as would suggest a “world”, no more. Later, fragmodumping became a form in itself.
>>There must be readers out there who were frustrated because Pierre Menard didn’t get any dialogue or a character arc.
I don’t doubt it.
“…to assemble just as many fragments as would suggest a “world”, no more. Later, fragmodumping became a form in itself.”
Funny. A couple of years ago I wrote a story that felt very influenced by your work, but I couldn’t put my finger on *how* precisely it was so. I’m now realizing it was in doing what you describe here.
Also: do you know the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA? It’s like an entire institution based on such principles. A museum as imagined by Borges, perhaps. And the fact that some of its exhibits are real, and some are (definitely or probably) not just adds to the effect.