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In speculative fiction stories, I knew, there were a variety of infodump content types and delivery mechanisms. "In speculative fiction stories--" I said, but the Doctor cut me off. "You said that already in narration," he said. "Continue."

I swallowed. "Doctor, your reputation for firmness but fairness is allowing me to continue without fear that you'll fire me from this lowly job as your assistant."

"Good, good," he smiled. "Go on."

"Infodump content types include the Backstory Historical, the Backstory Personal, and the Explanation Specialized (which has subtypes Scientific, Magical, and so on for other fields of human endeavor). Infodump delivery mechanisms include Faux Dialogue Naive (in which one character explains something to another character designed to be the reader-identification character, a character who doesn't have the necessary background and thus must have it explained to them), Faux Dialogue Redundant (in which one character explains something to another character who knows it already, as I am doing now), Faux Thought Redundant (in which a character thinks something to themselves that they already know), and Narrative."

"And are there specialized techniques for delivering infodumps?"

"A great many, Doctor," I said, gathering confidence. "For example, as you know, there is the famous 'As you know, Bob' introductory phrase. Another example: one character may interrupt to ask another character questions, avoiding the problem of an infodump turning into one gigantic endless paragraph." Then, too, I thought, pieces of an infodump may be provided using different delivery mechanisms, again breaking it up. "I trust that you read that bit of narrative and thus that I don't need to rep--"

"Yes, yes. Now, quickly, before our reader gets bored and turns the page: tell me the reasons that authors use infodumps."

"That one is almost too easy, Doctor; like all members of our society born in the past thirty years, I learned it while I was but a mere squalling babe. As the scriptures tell us (the scriptures you should be familiar with, having written them yourself): 'Thou shalt provide the reader with all of the information needed to understand everything in the story.' In the old days, before the advent of the Total Narrative Society, fiction sometimes contained ambiguous or unclear passages. These days, thanks to you and your colleagues, all fiction is completely clear. It may be, as some critics allege, that it has become a bit dull--"

"I leave it to History to judge the charge of dullness, my young friend. But what I really want to know is this: Can the infodump be done well? Think carefully before you answer; humanity's future may depend upon it."

I mused over all the infodumps I had encountered. As you know, self, I thought, so many of them are so bad! And in recent weeks, they had only gotten worse, with many stories in which my eyes had glazed over at paragraph after paragraph of poorly delivered backstory and quasi-scientific explanation. Furthermore, in many of those cases, the material presented wasn't remotely necessary to the story; they were cases of the author being so enamored of their worldbuilding and ideas and research that they felt they had to stop the story to explain them to the reader.

And yet, I had to admit to myself, sometimes infodumps are presented well. The best infodumps I had seen were generally presented as narrative, told directly to the reader, without explicit attempts to disguise them as dialogue or thoughts. Then, too, sometimes they took the form of encyclopedia or dictionary entries, though that was a technique that could easily be overused.

"Still," I mused aloud, "most of the time the information presented in an infodump would be better handled as subtle cues integrated into the rest of the story. A character might refer to having been injured in the War, for example, and leave the reader to infer that there was a war, without pausing to explain the history of the war."

("In this case," noted the Doctor, in a hasty parenthesis, "the war in question is the Great Narrative War of the Year Zero, so-called because it was a war over the fundamental question of Narrative itself, and it took place during the year that was subsequently renamed to zero to indicate that we had begun a new era. I myself took part in that war; in fact, I was the leader of the Ninth Verbose Battalion, which--during the great climactic Battle of Nuff--took the city of--"

"Now, now, Doctor," I interrupted. "I was in the middle of my own infodump. One of the key principles of your Infodump Manifesto was that one should never nest infodumps, as that may lead to reader confusion."

"Quite right, quite right, my lad," the Doctor replied. "Carry on.")

"And so, in conclusion," I stated firmly, "I must conclude that some infodumps are indeed well done, though such instances are--in what has become known as the Cooking Paradox--rare."

"Excellent," said the Doctor. "Your stirring defense of the infodump has led me to decide to spare humanity after all."