"Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons," Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, "and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds."
"Machines were of little interest to me, perhaps because on frontal armor of each sat inspired to semitransparency inventor who verbosely explained structure and purpose of his handiwork. No one listened to inventors, and it seems they talked to no one in particular."
— A. & B. Strugatsky, "Monday Begins on Saturday" - story 3, ch.2 (description of travel into "depicted future").
Expospeak is an
Infodump about the world itself. If you want a serious contender for the single thing that turns most people off to
Science Fiction, it's probably this:
People in
Science Fiction stories talk funny.
We are quick to identify
Techno Babble for what it is: a flurry of vaguely-scientific nonsense to cover up the fact that the writer just made it up. What we are slower to point out is that
Techno Babble is really just the most egregious form of a dialogue style rampant in
Science Fiction.
See,
Science Fiction is often set in a world not our own. This could be an actually alien world, Earth of a different time, or just the world we know with a secret magical subculture revealed. To get the differences across, characters will, in casual conversation, tell us about the world in which they live in a way that no one who actually lived there would ever do. It's as if you were driving somewhere with a friend, and suddenly said "Gee, travel sure got a lot easier since we started basing our cars on the internal combustion engine!" or "
As You Know, a red light means 'stop', while a green light means 'go'."
It's not simply limited to technology:
Science Fiction writers want to explain
everything. How does their evil plan work? What's their motivation for carrying it out? How old is the character? What's his backstory? A good writer in other genres will probably
know all of these things, but only in
Science Fiction (or rather,
Speculative Fiction) will the writer feel the need to actually
tell us all of it. The
Continuity Nod abounds too.
When the writer gets sufficiently desperate to explain a bit of science or continuity, one can be left with the impression that he's not doing it so much for our benefit, as to
make sure we know he did his homework.
Expospeak is facilitated by:
To better see what this sounds like, consider
this story by Mark Rosenfelder
, which applies the techniques of
Expospeak to a non-
Sci Fi story.
Note that some recent series — especially ones which have had mainstream success — have tried to avoid
Expospeak, such as the new
Battlestar Galactica and
Doctor Who. What they pick up in the mainstream, they often lose on the fringes, as fans become angered and accuse the writers of sloppiness because they
didn't explain everything. A good, but rather old, example of how to do
Expospeak well without annoying the target audience would be
GunBuster; there, the
Expospeak was limited to
Omake segments on the tapes/laserdiscs/
DV Ds, which were completely separate from the main show.
A predeliction for
Expo Speak hasn't prevented
Police Procedural shows such as
CSI from leaping to the top of the
ratings (and Dan Brown's books, laden with Expospeak about different subjects, to the top of the bestsellers list), lending credence to the oft-expressed idea that the reason speculative fiction only
seems to be in decline as a genre is because its tropes have been adopted by the mainstream. In other words, all fiction is speculative fiction now.
It may not be the expospeak itself that is offputting about speculative fiction, but the seeming utility of it.
Police Procedural are ultimately set in the real world. If you're watching
CSI, you may learn something that is in some way useful. Expospeak in SciFi, however, is almost never of any value outside of learning the minutae of someone's fictional world. Granted, the Expospeak in
CSI is no less likely to be inaccurate than in SciFi, but
most people forget that. Most people would rather listen to the
Script Wank that might someday exonerate them from some crime than the
Script Wank about a
Negative Space Wedgie. When people
do talk this way in the real world, what you get is the
Expospeak Gag.
See Also:
Luckily My Powers Will Protect Me
