: Re: "The flux capacitor--it's what makes time travel possible." When to keep world-building explanations short Gosh, I really think I'm quite clever sometimes. But what about those situations where

@Carla500

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It's a Your Mileage May Vary situation, but I think there are two good rules of thumb:

1) Explain only as much as you need for the story to make sense. This will vary depending on your audience, but roughly, anything specialized to your world or your story will need a minimum of explanation. Your readers are, at a baseline, familiar with 2017 (today's) technology. Anything set after that (or before it) will need to be accounted for. Today, if Person A wants to contact Person B, s/he pulls a cell phone out of his/her pocket. In 1942, you had to find a physical phone. In 1895, you had to send a telegram or a letter. In 2060, we might have data transmission chips in our heads, so you only have to think the message.

You need to explain what the chip is, and that a message sent from one chip to another is called a shunt, or shunting. What you don't need to do is explain is how the chip actually works. You have to establish that your character has a chip which can send and receive, you need to run through the procedure of Activate Chip — New Message — Address Book — Compose — Send or however it works the first time, and then that's it. Don't belabor the details. After that, it's "Betty sent a quick shunt to Carl about dinner. He shunted back //sure, sounds fine//, so she made the reservation for eight."

2) Explain only what matters for the story. Your alien city may have a magnificent monorail circling it, and in your worldbuilding backstory you had a whole two-year political fight about getting the permits and securing the space and protests and jobs and pollution and people buying and selling land and so forth, but if the only time the character sees the monorail is on approach... you don't need to tell the reader any of the backstory. It's not relevant. The only details you need to share are the ones which affect plot and character.

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