: Re: How to avoid or mitigate heavy science lingo and "technobabble" in a science fiction story? Background I am currently working on a small science fiction story (as referenced in a previous question

@Carla500

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I, personally, hate one of suggested approaches of "following it up with for the dummies in the back", which seems to be very popular in US-made works. It just screams: "Hey, reader, me, hero is smart and you and all those other characters around me are dumb, allow me to explain my brilliance to you, troglodytes!" It is especially painful if it follows with explanation of some trivial concept from middle-school.

First, make sure that your technobabble-loaded solution of problem IS actually necessary - i.e. it is entertaining to see that your protagonist will figure it out. Then identify what parts of it could be "unknown" for general reader. And then start slowly introducing them into hero's musings or observations with explanations using general enough terms. There are many different ways to do that and you can use different approach for each separate piece of technobabble: for one piece, hero will remember something from his past, for another he will see something going around him on planet that will remind him of important properties of second piece, make him solve a minor task with third piece in a way that is a simplified version of what he will do later, etc.

Ideally, thanks for this slow foreshadowing and building up, savvy reader should figure out hero's solution just along with him or a bit earlier without any heavy all-in-one-page infodumping or treating reader like an idiot. And people who already knew details would be happy to see them used properly as the story goes on, have their Genius Bonus and warm feeling of being right when figuring where all this going in advance.

(Personal anecdote:
I know I was happy when hero of ΛLDNOΛH.ZERO faced mech with full-body impenetrable force field and I immediately thought: "but if no kind of radiation, including light can break through, then how does it see at all?" and then through the episode hero asked same question and figured out that it uses remote drones that can be blocked in several ways and that there should be a weakpoint where receiver can get transmission from those.)

For some examples you could read Jules Verne books or Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories - there's a great deal of physics and chemistry-based story points in many of those that are seamlessly explained.

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