Dune, Exposition, Education

I’ve been reading Dune and it’s shaping out to be one of my favourite books, but one thing in particular stood out to me: the characters are boring. How can a story be this good with boring characters? For me the answer is that the focus and enjoyment lies elsewhere: partly in the political intrigue between different factions, but mostly in the exposition. The exposition is so good!

This surprised me because I associate exposition with boredom or dull story telling. Too much exposition is after all often cited as a critique to stories. The subject matter of Dune is similar to that of a history class, describing a civilisation and the rise of a new emperor, indeed in the appendixes this similarity is made explicit as those are diegetically excerpts from historical recountings. This should in theory make me extremely bored as such exposition about history was one of the most boring part of school for me.

Despite my presumptions about exposition Dune sucked me in precisely with exposition, and I think I know how: it expertly omits information from the reader. This may sound contradictory since even in just the opening chapter the reader is bombarded with new words, and besides omission is pretty much the opposite of exposition — but that’s exactly my point. None of those new terms are explained explicitly nor implicitly. What we do get to know however, is how the characters relate to those terms, and in general a sense of weight is built up behind them. For example early on we get to hear about “Muad’dib”, a person of almost mythological status, and that it’s likely referring to the main character in the future. Except for this small piece of information we don’t get to learn much more about Muad’dib which builds up anticipation. What will the main character go through to get that name? And what does it signify? Who is Muad’dib? These questions are answered much later when the reader has built an emotional attachment and an understanding of the name’s importance which makes the explanation much more satisfying and interesting. (sidenote: This isn’t necessarily pure naturalistic exposition where the facts are woven into the story in a natural way. I think the answers can be explained explicitly to the reader and it still works.¹ ) In other words, setup and payoff is an important technique also when writing exposition, and Dune has an expert understanding of that.

Contrast this with my experience reading some inexperienced authors. Then the biggest reason I find a story boring is because there is too much exposition without any setup. It’s common for me to see stories that explain an important concept when they first show it, which is often too early for me. I don’t care about the details of this fantasy world’s governance or magic system that I’ve never heard of before because I haven’t had the chance to build an emotional connection to it yet. The first problem, that I haven’t heard of the concept before, is fixable by making sure that I have heard of it before — perhaps by mentioning it in passing in advance, and the second is addressable by showing me what the characters’ relation towards it is. After that you’ve probably prepared me enough to make me interested.

Interestingly enough I see some parallels to education, especially math education since I’m more familiar with it but I’m sure it applies to many subjects. In math class the teacher often introduces a new thing by picking some axioms from thin air and then write them on the black board. The problem with this is the same as with bad exposition in fiction: Why should I care about this thing you just metaphorically slapped me in the face with? Is it important? Where is it valuable? Why was it precisely those axioms? Surely it didn’t come to you by divine intervention?

If the new thing abstracts over (i.e. extracts the common parts of ) things I’m already supposed to be familiar with maybe you could start with that. Go over some examples of different things — say addition over integers, multiplication over integers and modulo addition — and show me how these things are behaving suspiciously similar to each other. Now you’ve shown me why an abstraction might be useful beforehand, and you’ve even set up a mystery to further increase my interest and curiosity: what are the common parts of these things? Maybe I’ll even try to solve it by myself. To top it all off, you’ve already explained the abstraction in informal terms so when you get to the axioms I already understand it on some intuitive level so I’m more likely to understand the formal definitions and I know why you chose precisely those axioms. This might not be applicable in every situation, but having at least some emotional attachment — a sense of what we’re talking about and why, helps me a lot with learning. Setup and payoff is a useful tool for exposition even in formal educational contexts.

To summarise Dune has been a very interesting book to me. It’s not really the characters or the science fiction concepts that stand out to me, but rather the way it’s presented. I feel like it really respects my intelligence and encourages me to try to understand as much as possible, without feeling like I’m stupid for not understanding everything. Maybe that’s why it has held up so well in science fiction circles, the concepts it presents could easily be copied or iterated upon but the way it’s written stands on its own.