![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"As You Know, Banichi"
Aug. 12th, 2010 11:09 amSomething just struck me, while rereading Cherryh's atevi series (currently, Defender) that I probably should have noticed much sooner.
One of the characteristic problems of science fiction is the infodump: the need to provide the reader with information specific to the universe of the story. Many even of the greatest SF writers (Poul Anderson was a notable example) were notoriously clumsy about this, and the "as you know, Bob" trope (in which one character delivers a speech to another, providing information the other would naturally have, purely for the benefit of the reader) has become a byword.
C. J. Cherryh, as I've mentioned before, typically writes extremely dense prose, and figuring out what's really going on is a nontrivial exercise. What I just realized is this: in the atevi series, there is a constant need for Bren to translate human words into ideas comprehensible to the atevi. Their psychology is different enough that such interpretation is vitally important, within the story; and if it also provides the reader with a chance to re-analyze what's going on, so much the better. Kudos to her, then, for a nice (partial) solution to the infodump problem. Very good indeed.
One of the characteristic problems of science fiction is the infodump: the need to provide the reader with information specific to the universe of the story. Many even of the greatest SF writers (Poul Anderson was a notable example) were notoriously clumsy about this, and the "as you know, Bob" trope (in which one character delivers a speech to another, providing information the other would naturally have, purely for the benefit of the reader) has become a byword.
C. J. Cherryh, as I've mentioned before, typically writes extremely dense prose, and figuring out what's really going on is a nontrivial exercise. What I just realized is this: in the atevi series, there is a constant need for Bren to translate human words into ideas comprehensible to the atevi. Their psychology is different enough that such interpretation is vitally important, within the story; and if it also provides the reader with a chance to re-analyze what's going on, so much the better. Kudos to her, then, for a nice (partial) solution to the infodump problem. Very good indeed.
