Now, if the truck lets the dirt dribble out a little at a time, it isn't painful, and you can keep climbing on top of the pile as it gets higher.

I think the best way to look at it is what is important where. I've been working at scifi for the past year or so, and it isn't easy to introduce a new world, a new society, and an totally alien world without giving the reader some information. But there are different ways of doing this. Dialog does serve as one means, as long as both characters don't already know the information you are providing. Don't use dialog to tell me, the reader, something both characters know already.

The method I've come to rely on the most, is dribbling out the information as extra sentences in a paragraph. But it has to be related information. If the character is looking at the moon (or moons) for some legitimate reason, then it is ok to toss in a line or two to point out one or two features that would be noticeable to the character. This is something we can miss quite easily and can be jarring to a reader. I'll toss in an example:

Sam and Jill are on a first date and going to a place neither has been to before.
Sam hurried to open the door for Jill who seemed not to notice. Her head moved around the front room of the place ignoring the girl who asked how many. The place resembled a taxidermist reception area with all the animal heads and small stuffed creatures, but the people dining there looked normal enough.
And then Jill:
The taxi let them out at a building that looked shabby. Jill had been told this was one of the best restaurants in town, but the front door looked gaudy with all the brass and polished trim. As she walked into the place, her stomach quivered at the site of so many butchered animals. Everywhere she looked she saw a head or body of some poor creature.
Sam notices very little of the place other than a curiosity, while Jill is almost ill about it. While the example might not be great, the point is that the information we use to provide information to the reader has to be framed from the perspective of the pov character. If Sam were to have the same reaction as Jill, and we already know that he goes hunting every year, that would violate Sam's character.

That leaves the paragraph, and longer forms of information we could have. This is where most of us will go wrong. As a general rule, if you find paragraphs of information in the first couple pages, several of them, you are more than likely dumping info on the reader. How long is too long? Well, that depends, but try and give only the bare minimum of what is necessary to keep the reader from being confused. There will be plenty of time to provide details later when the reader really needs them.

I have read pages of info in books, and they worked fine, because by that point in the book I wanted to know. Then I have read chapters of indulgent crap that if I hadn't been 600 pages into the book I'd have probably dropped it. This brings to mind one other point we forget sometimes. The reader never needs to know all the details we came up with. When creating a story, we, as authors, have to know all about the world and people we are writing about. I'll reference Tolkien and his books of notes he created on middle earth. While I do believe that might be a bit extreme for most of us, I do think we should know our worlds fairly well if we expect to write believably about them. All that back fill makes for dull reading. I make a strong attempt to read the Simerillian many years ago. All the things Tolkien choose not to put in his stories can bee seen there. The creation of the world, and so on and so on. That is the kind of stuff that might be useful to us as writers (our own background info, not Tolkien's), but the reader will never need to know it.

That is the key Tracy - keeping up your narrative momentum without losing the reader because you haven't provided them with enough information. I think Lord Darkstorm has the main of it here - let out information slowly, and only the most pertinent information. The balance point between providing too much and not enough information is a pretty narrow little thing, and it's easy to stray across on both sides of the divide.

About the only way to learn this is to write and try different approaches, and to read and attempt to pay attention to how the author is feeding you information. The less you notice it, the better the author likely is.

I learned lots about infodumps by reading Fleming's Bond books--I think he's a master at it. Fleming's infodumps are interesting (to gearheads), clearly relevant to the story so far, and full of elegant or interesting detail. Often, they're nice prose too.

Most interestingly, one of Fleming's techniques is to have Bond interview an expert about, say, the international gold bullion trade. The expert is usually eccentric in some amusing fashion, and because Bond's interested, we are too. (This is similar to the technique of making us feel scared of a baddie by showing characters we respect fearful of him.)

Hope this helps,
Pat

This is probably one of those instances where the term "showing" can actually apply literaly...whenever you can giving information by having whatever it is happen or be demonstrated is usually good.

But some times you just gotta "tell". For my part, when this is needed, I try to make it as interesting as possible, and weave it into the context and flow of the narrative as smoothly as can be. Doesn't always work of course.

1) Don't interrupt the pace (If it's an action pace, don't slow down to explain in-depth, find the shortest way to get the point across).

2) Keep in PoV (Describe what the character sees--which will always be flavored. What for one person will be a marvel of architectual devlopment, will for another be a monstrocity of glass and steel that chomps into the landscape.)

3) Keep it relevant to the forward progression of the story. (It always tough to cut when you feel the information will leave the world incomplete, but that's why the author always knows more than the audience.)

Now, I'm no master, but these are the things I do which most often work. Most info-dumps that I've encountered violated 1 or all 3 guidelines.

One of the things I thought actually came close to working in that book was the way Brown positioned his flashbacks and info-dumps. As I recall, they all seemed to happen when his characters were on their way to the Next Place.

Which meant he wasn't stopping the action to get information to the reader because the reader was allowing travelling time for the characters.