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09/17/2001 Archived Entry: "Thinks..."

A few thoughts from halfway through Thinks... by David Lodge. Definitely an interesting book in the way it's structured and speaking personally I was pleased to see such a good treatment of cognitive science in it - apparently Lodge decided to write the book after he attended a conference on the subject at Cambridge. Lots of good stuff about Searle's Chinese Room and computational loads.

I tend to judge authors (unfairly) on their ability to data dump. Data dumping is a term used to describe how an author might reel off a whole load of facts about some system or history that's necessary for the story to go forward. As the term sounds, it's not a very subtle way of informing the reader as it generally involves a narrator or character just explaining things straight out - dumping out data. When you're dealing with science fiction, where authors often have to create entire new universes and populate them with interesting characters, locations and concepts, there's necessarily a lot of exposition in order for the reader to understand all of this.

Good authors will weave the explanations right into the plot so you don't really notice them, or at least they're not particularly obvious. Bad authors will employ, say, one very bright character explaining things to another uninformed character in very dry terms. It's very jarring and even some of the best SF authors succumb to data dumping.

I don't feel that you have quite the same situation in contemporary fiction, for the opposite reasons explained above. However, when you're trying to introduce a subject like cognitive science to a readership who clearly won't have the faintest idea of what it means (e.g. people who read David Lodge novels) then exposition is required and data dumping is danger. David Lodge managed to avoid this quite neatly and I've really enjoyed the way in which he's slowly introduced the concepts to the readers through conversations and streams-of-consciousness (is there a plural for that?).

What I'm trying to say here is that so far, it's a good book.