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} }) </script> </div> </form> </fieldset> <article class="entryArticle content STeditorial"> <header class="entryHeader icon-theme"> <h1 class="entryTitle">Infodump </h1> </header><p class='tagLine'>Entry updated 30 December 2024. Tagged: Theme.</p><div class="browsingBtns"> <span> <input class="button PNI previous" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?id=p&entry=infodump'" value="Prev" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI next" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?&entry=infodump'" value="Next" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI incoming" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/incoming.php?entry=infodump'" value="About This Entry" title="What links to the entry; contributor initials explained; how to cite; other information" /> </span> </div> <p>An item of sf <a href="/entry/terminology">Terminology</a> commonly used to designate chunks of technical discourse inserted into fictional texts, usually texts described as <a href="/entry/hard_sf">Hard SF</a>, which are based (or claim to be based) on non-fantasized understandings of <a href="/entry/technology">Technology</a> and science. It is therefore often safe to assume that the infodump itself, certainly in the hard sf context, is a condensation of non-fantasized knowledge, and that it is therefore simultaneously integrated into but distinct from the <a href="/entry/sf_megatext">SF Megatext</a>. This sense that the infodump fits uneasily into most sf texts is strengthened by hard sf's didactic advocacy of the virtues of real-world technology and science; an infodump that buttresses and authenticates the <a href="/entry/thought_experiment">Thought Experiment</a> of a hard sf story should not, therefore, promulgate <a href="/entry/imaginary_science">Imaginary Science</a> or previously discredited <a href="/entry/scientific_errors">Scientific Errors</a>. In hard sf, the infodump is meant to be perceived as truthful to fact.</p> <p>Though the pure infodump (as described above) may normally be presented in terms that seem to brook no dissent, there is of course no such thing as a value-free literary device, a truism all the more pointed when the central function of the literary device in question is information retrieval. This is not simply because it is the winners who write history; it is in fact central to <a href="/entry/information_theory">Information Theory</a> that <i>Homo sapiens</i> cannot separate "pure" information from the shape information takes in order that we may perceive it. In this light, a condensed information-conveying device like the infodump is almost always conspicuously marked by signs of advocacy, and the hard sf assumption that its contents are value-neutral can be seen as contrarian. </p> <p>Examples of the concentrated dumping of information can of course be found throughout Western literature, an early instance being <a href="/entry/homer">Homer</a>'s description of the Greek fleet and its origins in the <i>Iliad</i>, the most intense perhaps being William <a href="/entry/shakespeare_william">Shakespeare</a>'s description of the first sight of Cleopatra in <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> (performed 1607; <b>1623</b>): "I will tell you. / The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd Throne, / Burnt on the water: The poop ..." (a point, perhaps, where ekphrasis becomes infodump). <a href="/entry/proto_sf">Proto SF</a> texts frequently contain explanatory passages – most of them visibly shaped to convey <a href="/entry/politics">Political</a> or <a href="/entry/satire">Satirical</a> points – which can be seen as ancestral to the twentieth century infodump. After 1800 or so, as plural and contesting explanations of the nature of things multiplied, documentary assertions that the truth was being told frequently mark the modes of retrieval commonly found in <a href="/entry/fantastika">Fantastika</a>. The highly elaborated story forms of the <a href="/entry/gothic_sf">Gothic</a> as a whole – tales within tales within tales, each inserted in order more and more securely to <i>ground</i> the surrounding text – can be seen as verging on infodump, certainly in a desperately explanatory text like Charles <a href="/entry/maturin_charles_r">Maturin</a>'s <i>Melmoth the Wanderer</i> (<b>1820</b> 4vols), or in the intense reiterations of back-story that a few years later mark the <i>Ring Cycle</i> (<i>1854-1876</i>) operas of Richard Wagner (1814-1883), where Wotan's sequential reconstructions of the past come closer and closer to an accurate <a href="/entry/prediction">Prediction</a> of doom, which is to say (in terms that some sf critics might recognize) that in Wagner the past is a spoiler. It may be insufficiently sensitive to his didactic enterprise to describe as Gothic or Wagnerian the innumerable operatic infodumps at the heart of so many of his novels, but Jules <a href="/entry/verne_jules">Verne</a> clearly shares a need with his predecessors to universalize what in a mere romancer might be no more than back-story, so that his voyages can extrapolate real worlds from the fixative rhetorics of science and technology. The fatal propensity of authors of <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopias</a> to shape their narratives as a sequence of lectures, often climaxing in <a href="/entry/economics">Economics</a>, similarly shares a need to present argument as no more than reportage; this infodumping approach, albeit more artfully, also informs Theodore <a href="/entry/sturgeon_theodore">Sturgeon</a>'s exposition of utopia in <i>Venus Plus X</i> (<b>1960</b>). <a href="/entry/future_war">Future War</a> novels before World War One also tend to contain compressed cod histories, almost invariably shaped to present as self-evident the moral virtues of one nation over another. To the dismay of some readers, Arthur C <a href="/entry/clarke_arthur_c">Clarke</a>'s <i>3001: The Final Odyssey</i> (<b>1997</b>) is a sequence of infodumps, his <a href="/entry/sleeper_awakes">Sleeper Awakes</a> protagonist being cast in the role of Visitor and lectured to almost without stop.</p> <p>As the understanding of <a href="/entry/fantastika">Fantastika</a> has deepened over the past two centuries, the assertiveness of the form, and its heterodox relationship to consensual reality, are now better understood as comprising arguments about the world. In this light, the purest (though not the most rewarding) form of fantastika may well be the <a href="/entry/hard_sf">Hard SF</a> novel, at whose heart the infodump beats time. Even in the crudest examples of hard sf, its condensed clarity can convey a powerful rhetorical force. It may therefore be unsurprising to discover that in contemporary texts the infodump, or the knowledge that an infodump has been imparted, can be apprehended by the reader as an <a href="/entry/icons">Icon</a>, as a tangible representation that the right story is being told in the dark, without the cost of a laborious transmission of loaded data. Readers are often therefore offered lore beyond human ken via an intense invocation of infodump that, like a <a href="/entry/black_holes">Black Hole</a>, is almost entirely rumour: it is entirely through its effects that we register the omniscience of an ancient <a href="/entry/computers">Computer</a> about to tell us the secret of the race, or the sudden recovery from <a href="/entry/amnesia">Amnesia</a> of a <a href="/entry/heroes">Hero</a>, or the sudden jolt of knowledge that marks the coming into his own of an incipient <a href="/entry/superman">Superman</a>, or (for an example) the vast infodump embedded instantly in Patera Silk's mind by a godlike entity which may or may not be an <a href="/entry/ai">AI</a> in Gene <a href="/entry/wolfe_gene">Wolfe</a>'s <b>Book of the Long Sun</b>. </p> <p>Most infodumps, however, sometimes sadly, are nothing like instantaneous, and few attain the pyrotechnic exuberance of Alfred <a href="/entry/bester_alfred">Bester</a>'s scene-setting Prologue in <i>Tiger! Tiger!</i> (October 1956-January 1957 <a href="/entry/galaxy">Galaxy</a> as "The Stars My Destination"; <b>1956</b>; rev vt <i>The Stars My Destination</i> <b>1957</b>; rev <b>1996</b>). In sf criticism, the term is often used to pejoratively name a flaw, when the infodump presents as a large obstructive mass, a clump of narrative whose author has not properly digested it; this is a peril for writers and readers alike in <a href="/entry/sequels_by_other_hands">Sequels by Other Hands</a>, where a measured delivery of necessary information is hard to accomplish at the hands of multiple cooks. It may also become a visible tic in series which for the sake of new readers must repeatedly incorporate resumés of settings or furnishings, such as the <a href="/entry/alternate_history">Alternate History</a> (and its initiating <a href="/entry/jonbar_point">Jonbar Point</a>) of Randall <a href="/entry/garrett_randall">Garrett</a>'s <b>Lord Darcy</b> sequence; the ecstatic <a href="/entry/cyborgs">Cyborg</a> mind-fusion that recurs again and again in E C <a href="/entry/tubb_e_c">Tubb</a>'s <b>Dumarest</b> adventures; and the titular <a href="/entry/space_habitats">Space-Habitat</a> hospital's description in James <a href="/entry/white_james">White</a>'s <b>Sector General</b> stories. Adam <a href="/entry/roberts_adam">Roberts</a> has argued that Neal <a href="/entry/stephenson_neal">Stephenson</a>'s <i>Anathem</i> (<b>2008</b>) is essentially all infodump. Several sf novels deploy overt infodumps between chapters, as in John <a href="/entry/brunner_john">Brunner</a>'s <i>Stand on Zanzibar</i> (<b>1968</b>) – which homages the technique of <i>USA</i> (<b>1930-1936</b> 3vols) by John Dos Passos (1896-1970) – Joe <a href="/entry/haldeman_joe">Haldeman</a>'s <i>Mindbridge</i> (<b>1976</b>), and Frederik <a href="/entry/pohl_frederik">Pohl</a>'s <i>Gateway</i> (November 1976-March 1977 <a href="/entry/galaxy">Galaxy</a>; <b>1977</b>) and, rather less successfully, <i>Syzygy</i> (<b>1982</b>); Kim Stanley <a href="/entry/robinson_kim_stanley">Robinson</a>'s <i>2312</i> (<b>2012</b>) has some notably lyrical examples, as do almost all of his previous works; Andy <a href="/entry/weir_andy">Weir</a>'s <i>The Martian</i> (<b>2014</b>) is full of more prosaic infodumping.</p> <p>Though most common in sf, the term is immediately comprehensible even to uninitiated readers, and is relevant to other literary forms; indeed, the entire oeuvre of Tom <a href="/entry/clancy_tom">Clancy</a> might be characterized as infodump novels of <a href="/entry/technology">Technology</a> transfer. The term itself seems fairly recent, though its use in computer design seems to go back decades. The earliest literary attribution recorded by Jeff <a href="/entry/prucher_jeff">Prucher</a> in <i>Brave New Words</i> (<b>2007</b>) is to Howard <a href="/entry/waldrop_howard">Waldrop</a> in 1990, telling us that it is in common use "in my neck of the woods"; but there are still earlier appearances in K W <a href="/entry/jeter_k_w">Jeter</a>'s <i>Dr Adder</i> (written 1972; <b>1984</b>), where "info-dump" in the hyphenated form is described as "The incompetent writer's way of revealing the details of his story's setting, or whatever axe that particular writer had to grind", with the coinage attributed to a book review in an old <a href="/entry/sf_magazines">SF Magazine</a>. [JC/HW/DRL]</p> <p><b>see also:</b> <a href="/entry/cliches">Clichés</a>.</p> <p><b>previous versions of this entry</b></p> <ul><li><a href='https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/infodump' target='_blank'>Internet Archive</a></li></ul><br /><br /></article></div> <div class="sideBarsWrapper"> <div class="sideBarsColsWrapper clearfix"> <div class="column sideBar12 clearfix"> <div class="columnForm"><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2>Recently visited entries<span style="background:url(/images/thingSFE2.png) !important"></span></h2><ul style='width: 50%; float: left;'> </ul> <p align=center style="float:right; padding-top:20px; padding-bottom:20px;">ISSN 3049-7612<br /> <a href="/facts.php?id=logo"> <img src="/images/VitMan.gif" width=150 height=150 title="Click for larger version of this SFE logo"></a><br /> <b><a href="/donate.php"><img src="/images/Paypal-Donate.gif" WIDTH="92" HEIGHT="26" BORDER="0" /></a><br /><a href="/">Home/Welcome page</a></b></p><div style="margin-bottom:10px;"></div></div> </aside><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2><i>SFE</i> Special Features<span></span></h2><p style="margin-top: 10px;"><input type="button" value="What’s New" style="width: 150px !important;" class="button primary" onclick="window.location.href='/whatsnew.php'">  Latest entries; 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