{"id":398,"date":"2006-07-17T10:24:34","date_gmt":"2006-07-17T10:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/17\/exposition-across-genres\/"},"modified":"2006-07-17T10:24:34","modified_gmt":"2006-07-17T10:24:34","slug":"exposition-across-genres","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/17\/exposition-across-genres\/","title":{"rendered":"Exposition Across Genres"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As you know, Bob, clumsy exposition, particularly in the form of lengthy &#8220;infodump&#8221; sequences in which large quantities of information are blasted toward the reader in the manner of a shotgun or a firehose, is often held to be one of the hallmarks (or, perhaps, banes) of the SF genre (where &#8220;SF&#8221; means &#8220;speculative fiction,&#8221; encompassing both &#8220;science fiction&#8221; and &#8220;fantasy&#8221;), which is why I was amused to discover the Little Professor (the <i>nom de net<\/i> of Miriam Burstein) <a href=\"http:\/\/littleprofessor.typepad.com\/the_little_professor\/2006\/07\/info_dumped.html\">discussing infodumps in Victorian literature<\/a>, in response to a <a href=\"http:\/\/mumpsimus.blogspot.com\/2006\/07\/infodump-assumptions.html\">more general discussion of infodumping<\/a> by Matthew Cheney, exploring the phenomenon and reader attitudes toward infodumping in various contexts and genres, and providing a nice reminder that the problems of SF <i>vis a vis<\/i> infodumping are not unique to that specific genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As you know, Bob, clumsy exposition, particularly in the form of lengthy &#8220;infodump&#8221; sequences in which large quantities of information are blasted toward the reader in the manner of a shotgun or a firehose, is often held to be one of the hallmarks (or, perhaps, banes) of the SF genre (where &#8220;SF&#8221; means &#8220;speculative fiction,&#8221;&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/17\/exposition-across-genres\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Exposition Across Genres<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}