Judith Butlerian Jihad: To be clear, this is a feature, not a bug. Fiction gets tedious when everything needs to have an explanation. The Star Wars fandom is weirdly obsessed with giving literally everything a whole damn backstory, but some things are better when they're left to just be.

Honestly, that's kinda Star Wars at its best. Like, how much does anyone know about this guy. How much did the movies and shows ever tell you?

I would revamp the STAR WARS franchise by introducing a whole bunch of aliens and – crucially – not telling the audience anything about them.

To be clear, this is a feature, not a bug. Fiction gets tedious when everything needs to have an explanation. The Star Wars fandom is weirdly obsessed with giving literally everything a whole damn backstory, but some things are better when they're left to just be.

One of the best lines in the original SW, now ruined by add-on media, was "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars", and NO ONE STOPPED TO EXPLAIN TO EACH OTHER WHAT THAT MEANT. It made the universe feel REAL. It had a past, and people who lived in it had shared knowledge of it. 1/2

2/2 Imagine how bizarre it would be to hear dialog like this in a modern movie: "Years ago, you served with my father in World War 2." "World War 2? What's that?" "Oh, that started when a man named Adolph Hitler invaded a country called Poland, which is in Europe, a continent far from here."

It's tied to an easy mistake in sci-fi writing. When getting into a car, most people don't have a whole internal monologue about the history and operation of internal combustion engines. So why would your characters do this for warp drives or whatever?

This was in the Star Trek “show bible” back in the 1960s. The example they used was Joe Friday and his revolver. If he doesn’t have to explain gunpowder, Kirk shouldn’t have to explain a phaser.

Exactly!

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Now instead of continuing my soliloquy, let me first break down exactly what that means.”

I read a book written like this once, and it was agonising. In the middle of an action scene, the author stopped to spend a whole paragraph explaining the detailed history of one type of ammunition – only for the character just say "wow, good thing that didn't hit me." It was never mentioned again.

That’s the best kind of sci-fi writing. The words have resonance and romance and appeal to imagination rather than explain. The first Star Wars is jam packed with that stuff — and some of it resonates to other classic sci-fi, intentionally — and now it can be an orgy of over-explanation.

Hence why so many stories have an outsider protagonist or major supporting character, so they can have things explained to them. "But Doctor, what IS a quantum flux inversion matrix, and why does it look like my dead Mum?"

That was Spock's job, "As we know captain, Andorians have a long history of..."

Kirk was supposed to be "a stack of books with legs" at the Academy, yet he's often in the role of "guy who needs basic facts explained to him". I think it was to make him more relatable; Spock got the job of "annoying know-it-all" so Kirk could be more informal. 1/2

Bring back third-person omniscient! Hell, do it for TV too. Rewatched NETWORK last year and Chayevsky has at least two instances of authoritative voiceover with no framing device. It would be an interesting stylistic choice in a scifi series—I wonder if someone could pull it off.

Sometimes, you have to trust the audience. If Scotty says, "The dilithium crystals are cracking under the strain!" after Kirk says "Maximum warp!", the audience can apply their generic knowledge of "how machines go" and infer that the crystals are akin to any part that might break when Go Too Fast.

An important point there is that the characters are giving information from their own POV too. The technical information comes from the engineer, because that makes sense.

How do you go about world building in a sci fi novel? I have a great setting in my head but don't know how to tell my story without it starting with an exposition dump. I'd guess there's a line between "show don't tell" and "give them no info and leave them confused" but I'm not sure where it is.

Work with a trustworthy editor, lol. Also, go ahead and overwrite, to start, so long as you're willing to kill your darlings. All that detail will make for a great reference doc to assist with fact-checking later in the editorial process.

I just ran into this story, and it's an excellent example of economic worldbuilding. It's less than 600 words, you may wish to check it out. www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five...

Five Views of the Planet Tartarus - Lightspeed Magazinewww.lightspeedmagazine.com Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick th...

I've found that the beauty of writing flash fiction and microfiction is that it really teaches you which parts matter and which don't. When you have such a tight word limit, you sometimes have no choice but to cut anything that isn't essential to the story.

And yet--I've been critiqued for not explaining my magic systems. In a novella. Sigh.

I think it's safe to say that there's some critique which we should all decide to just ignore.

Yeah, well, that one hit hard because it knocked me out of a competition. That was based on one reviewer's opinion. So I'm grumpy about it.

The Kessel Run line is similar. There is a very simple explanation of the original line that doesn't require paragraphs of fan wank for it and honestly tells us more about the characters than the fanwank we ended up getting.

EXACTLY. These mask wearing fish dudes were the best things about Book Of Boba Tea

Who are they? Where are they from? Who knows! Have fun daydreaming about that.

This is Star Wars. There's probably an eight-issue comic book series about what the one on the left had for lunch on their tenth birthday, the middle one has their own trilogy of novels by a mid-tier SF writer on the way, and the one on the right gets their own series streaming on Disney in 2029.

I just liked the air of mystery and their cool outfits. I later found out that OF COURSE they're a recycled enemy from the Clone Wars show and like 4 comic lines but I didnt need more backstory:)

It's inevitable, and not even a Disney thing: they would've had a 73-paragraph Wookiepedia entry back in the day. I get nostalgic for the halcyon days between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back when it was just a movie, the original Marvel comics, a couple of books, and Star Wars could be anything.

Could be anything, and was, like the time Han Solo teamed up with a six foot talking green rabbit to play Seven Samurai against Sergio Aragones. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. One of my favorite stories, as I was 13, had never seen the SS trope before, and loved all things Star Wars.

Or, like, the Fish Nuns in The Last Jedi. Who were they? Why were they so judgmental and cranky? Dunno, don't care! Keep it just background detail of the universe!

Yeah, they were a nice touch. They were just... there. Occasionally exasperated at jedi shenanigans. That's all they needed to be.

What I want: ~87 fic writers each with their own different take on the fish nuns. Some can be backstory, some can be future fic, I don’t care, I want it all! What I don’t want: “canonical”backstory from Disney for the fish nuns.

Fish nun fanfic!

That's why Boba Fett had such a cult following- there was little to go on except the dialogue that implied he had disintegrated a quarry once

Just that one line. The Big Bad points a finger and sternly says "No disintegrations." It immediately makes everyone sit up and wonder, "wait, what happened the last time?"

And the jump cut to Fett looking for all the world like he just shrugged is amazing.

If JJ had directed it, Boba would have been "ughhh fine"

The number of clients recently that I have advised to NOT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING in the first ten minutes of the script. Just. Please. The characters do not have to talk about all the stuff that they would already know. Let the audience wonder.

Yes, very much this! It's so much more interesting to drop the audience into the world and let see it through the eyes of the characters.

This also probably has something to do with why Star Wars fandom loses their dang minds whenever new canon comes out, because they want everything to be explained, but they want the canon explanation to match what they came up with in their heads. And you can't match EVERYONE'S headcanon at once.

Very much this. At this point, the entire franchise is confined by a collection of dogmatic "fans" who think that their ideas of what it should be are immutable and any deviation from them is some kind of tragedy. It's... weird.

The Bea Arthur character from the Star Wars Holiday Special has, like, a few hundred, maybe a thousand, words or more of backstory on Wookiepedia.

I'm not sure whether or not to find that hilarious

"Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." (Source Disputed)

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