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When writing science fiction or fantasy, how do you acclimate your reader to your setting without drowning them in exposition?
In my mind, I've got this pretty intricate setting that's relatively unique in a lot of ways, but after going back and glancing over the beginning of my first draft, I can tell that it would be pretty confusing to try and get everything straight.
In the first "part" of my piece I go over:
>The caste system of the main protagonist's culture
>The physical description and morphology of their race
>I drop some designations for various military ranks of magic users and secret police.
>Use character "names" that sound like robot names, like RC-3L and 045.
>Use some vague Sci-Fi terms with the idea that I will go in to more detail on them later.
On one hand, I'm worried that anyone that read this would get overwhelmed with all of the sudden exposition, but on the other I feel like it might be a sort of "trial by fire" where if they stick to it, the reader can be rewarded with an eventual explanation for all of these things.
Also, how do you deal with people that only look at the surface of your work or hear the elevator pitch and automatically label it as "derivative"? (Mind you, I'm just a younger guy that's writing some sci-fi adventure stories for fun, with no intent on getting published.) It feels like whenever I describe the story I'm trying to tell, they are caught up on it being "like Star Wars".
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Holy shit stop writing science fiction and fantasy. Fuck.
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>>9475405
>Use character "names" that sound like robot names, like RC-3L and 045.
>Get's mad when people say it's like star wars.
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>>9475414
Why? Is all genre fiction inherently worthless?
What if it's fun to write?
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>>9475405
If things have to be explained later, then it's not really an exposition but just a messy start.
Second, some readers (like me) love long expositions and having things explained and learning about the meta behind it but the classical storytelling and publisher advice is "Never explain anything, just jump right in with some character saying some eye-catcher and go from there". But if you don't want to publish, you don't have to write like that.
I will say so that any book that puts much emphasis on the morphology of a race or the names is going to be worthless 08/15 genre fiction shit that no one needed. I'll listen to you explain a caste system but I don't give a shit about how pointy your elf ears are unless you spend a good amount of lines on really big really perky tits.
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>>9475405
You're talking about the learning curve of your book. Put exposition in dialogue, and not everything at once. Characters should talk about things like we talk about everyday things - obliquely, briefly, in slang or euphemistically. The reader fills in the gaps.
Brandon Sanderson has a lecture series about these matters on youtube.
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