“But
how does it work, Professor?”
I write today about a technical point
of science-fiction writing; the Exposition. The beautiful blonde asks the
Professor how the machine works, and he launches into a long exposition full of
technobabble. This has two flaws; it commits the writer to invent
pseudoscience, and it’s boring. The first is an offense against science, the
second an offense against fiction.
I propose a superior method. It goes as
follows:
***
The beautiful blonde bats her long
eyelashes and asks the Professor how the machine works. He struts and preens
and starts technobabbling; but our hero is bored because he knows 1) all that
stuff already, 2) that the Professor is trying to get into her pants, and 3)
that he will not succeed. So our hero politely excuses himself and leaves the
room; then he goes to service the machine itself.
It badly needs
maintenance; the rectilinear reciprocator is askew, the turboencabulator need
regaussing, the helbertian is underpolynomic, and worst of all the flux
capacitor is de-retrinitized. He storms back to the Professor (who halts his
exposition) and demands to know where to find another flux capacitor; the
Professor says where, the blonde asks what a flux capacitor is, the Professor
explains that it’s a kind of AC battery, the blonde, astonished, says, “you
mean it stores an alternating current?”,
the Professor says, “Yes, my dear, you see, the electroweak resonance of the
aludium fozdex modules...” and our hero goes to the storeroom. He repairs the
machine, cursing entropy and bureaucratic inefficiency all the while. They send
us off on a mission in a machine like this?! Scandalous! They might as well
throw us straight into the Sun and be done with it!
Our hero finishes his work; the machine
works, sort of, probably; and he returns to the Professor. The Professor has
just finished the exposition; the blonde exclaims that now it all makes perfect
sense; he then offers to explain it in further detail, this evening perhaps;
but she says no, she’ll be busy.
***
As
you can see, my method is satirical. I seek the absurd. In my method, the hero walks
away from the explanation, and it occurs mostly offstage, with our hero hearing
disconnected nonsense fragments.
This method blows off the fictional
mechanics, the better to serve the mechanics of the fiction. It wastes
none of the writer’s or the reader’s time on boring pseudoscience; it gives us
interesting sexual play between the characters; it makes our hero out to be a
hard-working ordinary joe; and best of all, it foreshadows lots of interesting
ways for the machine to break.
Besides, didn’t you always tune out
during the exposition? So why shouldn’t our hero?
Note
the easter eggs; rectilinear reciprocator, turboencabulator, flux capacitor, de-retrinitization.
(The last from some Soviet SF.) And aludium fozdex is the Shaving Cream Atom,
from “Duck Dodgers in the 24+1/2th Century.” My method can use the entire
history of skiffy BS as raw material. For instance; adeledicnandar, Illudium
PU-36, Jarnell intersplit, Altruizine, Pyre-E, positronics, stroon, space-3. And
of course the old standbys; hyperspace, warp drive, force fields. And of course
more modern buzzwords; nanotech, metamaterials.
I got “Helbertian” from
a typo on an Analog magazine mailing label. They thought that’s my last name.
F&SF once thought my name is “Helleretti”. I figure that a helbertian is a
quantum wave operator; and the helleretti are a tribe of mischievous sprites.
I
would dearly love to quote from Sokal’s hoax. Imagine a starship running on a
morphogenetic field; and the Professor tells the blonde:
“In this way the infinite-dimensional
invariance group erodes the distinction between the observer and the observed;
the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and
universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative
observer becomes fatally decentered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a
spacetime point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.”
Po-mo space flight!
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