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1->''"Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons," Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, "and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds."''
2-->-- '''Christopher Backeberg''', 2006 Winner of the Literature/BulwerLyttonFictionContest, Science Fiction category.
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4Expospeak is {{Exposition}}, often an {{Infodump}}, about the world itself.
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6ScienceFiction is often set in a world not our own. This could be an actually alien world, Earth of a different time, or just the world we know with a secret magical subculture revealed. To get the differences across, characters will, in casual conversation, tell us about the world in which they live. It's as if you were driving somewhere with a friend, and suddenly said "Gee, travel sure got a lot easier since we started basing our cars on the internal combustion engine!" or "AsYouKnow, a red light means 'stop', while a green light means 'go'."
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8It's not simply limited to technology: ScienceFiction writers want to explain ''everything''. How does their evil plan work? What's their motivation for carrying it out? How old is the character? What's his backstory? What's the political history of the region he's living in? A good writer in other genres will probably ''know'' all of these things, but only in ScienceFiction will the writer feel the need to actually ''tell'' us all of it -- it frequently seems as though the author is less concerned that the audience won't understand what's going on, and more concerned that they might not believe that he/she's really thought everything all the way through. Sadly, this often serves the opposite purpose, making the audience all the more painfully aware when the explanations don't quite add up. The ContinuityNod abounds too.
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10When a writer gets sufficiently desperate to explain a bit of science or continuity, one can be left with the impression that he's not doing it so much for our benefit, as to [[ShownTheirWork make sure we know]] ''he'' did his homework. While other writers use Exospeak when it's completely unnecessary as a joke, the ExpospeakGag.
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12Note that some series have tried to avoid Expospeak. What they pick up in the mainstream, they often lose on the fringes, [[TheCoconutEffect as fans accuse the writers of sloppiness because they ''didn't'' explain everything]]. Reflecting this trend, a {{New Media|Tropes}} format of Expospeak was used in ''Anime/{{GunBuster}}'', where it was limited to [[BonusMaterial omake segments]] on the tapes/laserdiscs/[=DVDs=], and completely separate from the main show.
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14A predilection for Expospeak hasn't prevented PoliceProcedural shows such as ''Series/{{CSI}}'' from leaping to the top of the UsefulNotes/{{ratings}}, or many novels on bestsellers lists (Creator/DanBrown's books are laden with Expospeak about different subjects), lending credence to the oft-expressed idea that the reason speculative fiction only ''seems'' to be in decline as a genre is because its tropes have been adopted by the mainstream.
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16Overlaps with many tropes in the {{Exposition}} index. See also LuckilyMyPowersWillProtectMe, CallingYourAttacks, and InformingTheFourthWall.
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18----
19!! Expospeak is facilitated by:
20* AsYouKnow -- Note, though, that not all instances of AsYouKnow are Expospeak: when an AsYouKnow is used to reveal something that previously happened off-screen or to reference a previous episode, that's not Expospeak. When it's used to frame an explanation about how the ''world'' of the series works, it is.
21* TechnoBabble
22* MrExposition
23* TheWatson
24----
25!!Examples:
26[[folder:Literature]]
27* In ''Literature/TheGoldenHamsterSaga'', Freddy is the only hamster in the world who can use a computer, and other animals accuse him of using expospeak when he uses words like "email" and "internet."

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