Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
Aside from me not knowing what a "Kim Stanley Robinson" is, I agree completely. A compliment to the quality of world-building would be a real draw for me.
Now, if they comment on the large AMOUNT of world building, that might send up a red flag.
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Exactly! KSR is a big fan of long passages of descriptive exposition, and has famously blasted the advice "show, don't tell" and objected to the term "infodump" as smartass abuse by cyberpunks. He thinks that anyone who doesn't like his infodumps is producing "attacks on the idea that fiction can have any kind of writing included in it", and that those people want him to "dumb it down".
So yes, his prolonged expository passages work for him; they just don't work for me. And I think that agile, slow-reveal world-building built-in to the narrative is the opposite of "dumbing it down". Rather, it generally demands more work from the reader.