Backstory
Quantum Storytelling has a great post debating how to deliver backstory for an unfamiliar world without doing an infodump. Subscribed.
An interesting example he cites is the beginning of Star Wars:
they simply tack a universe intro onto the beginning of the story, almost a prologue. Think of the rolling text at the beginning of Star Wars
When I thought of the beginning of Star Wars, I forgot all about the famous crawling text – I was thinking of the first ship, seemingly huge, gliding overhead, getting shot at, then the really, unimaginably, incredibly huge destroyer following it. That’s what establishes the setting of the movie – high-tech, vast imbalance of power, space travel, all that. If anything, “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”, &c. is distracting, disconcerting.
Maybe the scrolling text adds some portentousness, or is that pretentiousness? I dunno.
