Writer's Workshop: Technobabble and the Audience Surrogate

I. love. technobabble. But I recognize as well as anypony else that you've got to be careful with it. When done properly, it creates a sense of distortion, unease, and "behind the curve"-ness. But bobbled, or worse, done to cheat, and it just seems lazy, contrived, or pointless. But to ease us into this talk, let's cover the audience surrogate a bit.

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When we come into a story, we have nothing. ...Well, okay, in fanfiction, you have the canon from your original source, but even then, we only have that little bit. Anything you want the reader to know about your universe, you have to tell them somehow. (Write what's important!) The most common way to do that is through exposition: literally explaining it. If you want the reader to know that the house is blue, you say, "The house was blue." That's awfully telly, and it sounds lazy. Perhaps there's a better way. We'd like to do the explanation in-story, and in a way that flows naturally with the story.

Oh, I know! Have one character say it to the other. That'd make sense, right? Well... not really. I mean, if all your characters know the house is blue, who really needs it explained? What we need is some character who doesn't know that the house is blue, some schlub who can have everything we need to know explained to him.

This is the audience surrogate. They are us, only as a character in the world. They're usually someone who lives outside the standard lifestyle, like a country bumpkin or a peasant uplifted to the noble court. They're right on the cutting edge, which means they need to know everything that they're behind on. Basically, they need the exposition, just like we do. This role is extremely important, as they're the ones whom we can actually relate to. The other characters are following a lot of rules we don't fully understand, but the audience surrogate makes sense. (Of course, a good horror story, perhaps, might throw you off by making the audience surrogate act abnormal, but that's a twist on the formula.)

Now, here's something that might be confusing. The audience surrogate is not necessarily the Main Character. They're similar roles, but they're not the same thing. The Main Character is our emotional tie to the story; the audience surrogate is our physical tie to the story. Imagine, for example, a dying wizard who passes on his magic to a younger apprentice. Suppose the wizard is our Main Character, and the apprentice is the surrogate (and the Influence Character, incidentally). We have the same emotional bond to the story as the wizard (his dying hope in humanity), but we learn about the world and magic through the apprentice (who didn't know anything until the wizard explained it to them). Do you see how both roles are critically important? We need the Main Character so we know how to grow, but we need the audience surrogate to know where we are.

Okay, but I was here to talk about technobabble. Based on what I just talked about, technobabble is when we go a little further than the audience surrogate can comprehend. If my wizard starts talking about tetrathaumatic wave-charge negotiation, my poor little apprentice will be totally lost. But this could also happen with non-technical things. Imagine a scene where a family is bickering about something, and one of them says, "This is just like fourteen years ago at the ski slope!" If the audience surrogate doesn't know what the characters mean by that, then they'll be stuck, and so will the audience.

This is what I was talking about earlier. Technobabble is a powerful force for making your readers feel helpless, confused, and out of their depth. But that had better be what you want to use it for, or you'll be completely screwing up. You know why technobabble has such a bad name? Because it was used to empower, to explain, to save the day, and that's just plain old not its job.

I love watching The Flash, because they abuse this to heck. They'll try to explain why they need to push a character into the portal, but all that comes out is a bunch of gobbledygook. My brothers and I (okay, mostly I) came up with a response to these scenes: "Blah blah science science push him in the portal." This is kinda what they did in Star Trek too. "Blah blah science science, now we can translate what they're saying." "But it might be risky!" "We'll just have to try!" You see how the technobabble actively gets in the way of the story? We don't feel the same understanding and urgency that the characters do. We're still thinking, "Wait, what was the thing about tetrathauma-something?"

So how do we avoid this? The first and most obvious solution is what I just said: only use technobabble if you're trying to confuse or disorient your readers. My second recommendation is this: if a plot-critical piece of the story needs an advanced piece of tech or explanation for it to make sense, make sure you've explained everything to the audience surrogate before you hit that point. All stories are mysteries, in that the final resolution is a culmination of everything we've learned before. If you're missing a piece, or if you didn't explain a piece effectively enough, it's like a detective in a story pulling out a fact you weren't aware of. It feels unfair. You've cheated the readers out of their resolution, and they won't be happy.

I'll admit, these aren't hard and fast rules. We are working under the assumption, after all, that the only way to teach readers about your world is through exposition. Other ways are possible, if extremely difficult, and I have a feeling the audience surrogate is probably still gonna be around in one form or another. No matter what you do, though, you'd better make sure your readers are following along. If they're not... well, they're not really reading, are they? They're just looking at text, still trying to catch up.