Harkening way back to December of 2014, and the first appearance of “The Sci-fi Paperback Grab-bag,” and continuing a series of posts showcasing how any and every novel we might read is a lesson in writing, one way or another, let’s look at Star Bridge by Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn, which I randomly chose from those stacks of now-400+ mass market paperback books.
In an effort to combat the weird backlash I’ve been seeing against the basic fiction writing advice: “show, don’t tell,” and continuing on from my post from December 26, “How to Tell,” let’s look at a genre-specific example of the balance between “show” and “tell.”
The fact is that, especially in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, we have to convey information readers can’t just pick up organically or come into the book pre-armed with. If you’re writing a novel set in the real world present and mention Paris, you don’t then have to explain that Paris is a city in France. Anyone smart enough to read a novel in the first place knows what and where Paris is. But thrust those same smart readers into your invented fantasy world or richly imagined sci-fi future and that shorthand disappears. Still, though, we want to—need to—balance providing sufficient context so our readers have any idea what we’re talking about (tell) with the lived experience of our POV characters (show), which is what our readers are signing up for in the first place and is what will keep them reading. That means, yes, “show, don’t tell” if presented as a binary state: always show, never tell, is indeed terrible advice, especially for us genre authors. We need that lived, emotional experience, and we need to present our richly imagined worldbuilding.
When I say “show, don’t tell,” the first thing I’m attacking is the info dump. This is when authors effectively stop the story and start explaining, when they start writing an article instead of a scene. I’ve called out one author on that here, so you can see an example of what not to do, but in reading—and loving—Star Bridge, when I got to Chapter 8, I found a fantastic example of how to balance showing a character’s experience of an imagined world while conveying, not dumping, all sorts of specific information about how that world operates.
In Star Bridge, authors Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn seem to have committed the cardinal sin of opening each and every chapter with what, on the surface, would appear to be short info dumps. Presented under the title THE HISTORY, we’re “told” a little about the unique future in which interstellar travel, via a teleportation device, is strictly controlled by Eron, a monopoly that has reached imperial status. The story begins with our hero, Horn, having been sent to assassinate the leader of this monopoly. It’s a fun ride, and one that goes into deeper places as the story unfolds.
Here, then, is the opening “info dump” from Chapter 8:
THE HISTORY
Eron…
Bitter child of a negligent mother. Spawned and forgotten.
Eron. Man’s greatest challenge. Man’s greatest triumph.
You had nothing but hate; that you gave freely. You froze man while he compressed your thin air to make it breathable. You scourged him while he searched futilely for useful minerals and fertile soil. You changed him; you made him as hard and bitter as yourself.
It’s not surprising that he turned from you to the endless seas of space. Trade; raid. There was little difference between them.
Legend says that Roy Kellon found you, but legend is mistress to any man. Why should he have chosen you? Almost any world would have been fairer, sweeter, kinder. And you are nearly thirty light years from Earth, the Journey of a weary lifetime.
Eron. Where are you now? Man changed you more than you changed him. He hid you beneath an expanding skin of metal and put you at the center of a star-flung empire. You sit there, tamed, obedient, holding it together with golden strings.
Eron. You are the Hub. All roads lead to you…
Why does this work, “info dump” or no? To me there are two reasons, and the first is that it’s short.
I know—can it be that easy? That’s 185 words. We can get away with less than 200 words of pretty much anything, can’t we?
Yes, but only if it’s as inherently interesting as this, which is the second reason it works. What we just read isn’t an article or an encyclopedia entry, it’s written with a point of view, by some unidentified character who lives in this world. It’s not just facts, but a few small facts wrapped in interesting writing. So then is that the “rule” for info dumps? Keep them short and write them well and from any character’s POV?
You know what? It is that simple!
But there’s more.
The previous chapter ends with Horn jumping into the star bridge, but without the gold bands that control where you’ll end up and otherwise speed you through the experience of whatever goes on between Point A and Point B. Here the book gets as weirdly written as this experience is weird for Horn. It stays in his strict POV as he grapples with his difficult situation. Please read all of this…
The ships pushed through airlocks into the space around Eron. They located their assigned elevator. The massive elevator lowered each ship past level after level until it reached the appropriate one. The freighters went deep, close to the ancient, sterile rock of Eron itself. The fighting ships stopped at the barracks-level. The liners, reserved almost exclusively for the Golden Folk, dropped only a little.
But ships were useless to him. Even if he could steal one and get it into space, he would have no place to go. Not into Eron. The elevators were operated from inside the skin of the world. The nearest planet was years away by conventional drive; he would be recaptured quickly.
There had to be some way to get from the caps to Eron itself, other than by ship. Could he walk out on the surface in his spacesuit and find a way in? No, that wasn’t the way. Even if he could jump from the stationary cap to the spinning world without disaster, he would be dangerously exposed while he was searching for an entrance, if any.
There should be a direct connection. Not at the perimeter, although the relative motion would not be so great after all. If the caps were fifty kilometers in diameter and Eron rotated as rapidly as Earth, the relative motion would be less than seven kilometers an hour. But it would be awkward, waiting for doorways to align themselves; Eron would never plan it like that.
The nearer a man approached the pole, on the other hand, the less the linear velocity would be until it dropped away to zero directly over the pole. There, if anywhere, should be an entrance to Eron. Horn planned, in as much detail as his knowledge of Eron permitted, how he would get to Eron from the cap and what he would do when he got there.
But he could never quite forget the mouse of insanity nibbling at the edges of his mind. How swift is thought? How slow is time? How long is three hours?
All of the worldbuilding details in here, all the information, is immediately relevant to Horn’s experience in that exact moment. We aren’t being asked to remember stuff for later, as Chekhov warned us about so long ago. This is a POV character alone in a difficult situation, working through his specific knowledge of the world he lives in but that’s entirely alien to us, the reader. We’re not being told about this technology, we’re being shown its limits and how that affects the POV character, the “us” of the shared experience of the story. Nothing comes up here that isn’t an option Horn considers then dismisses. We’re working through this process of how do I get from here to there along with Horn rather than leaving the story to be antiseptically told about the world by Williamson and Gunn, who do not appear in their own novel, and nor should you appear in yours.
This is what we mean by “show, don’t tell.” It’s all about the immediate, story-focused experience of the POV character interacting with these specific components of your worldbuilding at this specific moment in the progression of the story.
—Philip Athans
More of what we’ve learned from random sci-fi novels…
Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars
Homer Eon Flint’s The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life
The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein
Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Fury Out of Time
Random Lessons From Random Books
Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain
Perry Rhodan #1: Enterprise Stardust
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
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This line pretty much sums it up “This is what we mean by “show, don’t tell.” It’s all about the immediate, story-focused experience of the POV character”
Thanks for presenting examples! This is amazing!