Not to presume to tell anybody how to do their job, but I wonder if other methods of presentation were considered (and dismissed, and if so for what reason). To me, the three big offenders is terms of constipated chunks were the Recent History of Federation/Borg Clashes, the Recent History of the Enterprise Crew, and the History of Hugh's Liberated/Unimatrix Zero Rebels. As I was reading through the first two, I wondered if it might not have been better to put all that recapping outside the narrative per se at the beginning of the book, a sort of "Previously on Star Trek: The Next Generation" thing (too off-putting to potential buyers to have such a large summary at the beginning, perhaps?).
That would've been worse. Ideally the way to handle exposition is to make it an integral part of the story, make it part of something that serves some purpose
other than exposition. For instance, you can include it in a scene that reveals something about a character's personality or conflict with another character -- leaven it with drama or emotion. Or humor, or sex, or
something that lets the reader take more away from the passage than just information. (For instance,
Analog editor Stanley Schmidt suggests that a good way to make exposition interesting is to have one character probing for information from another character who's reluctant to reveal it, so that there's dramatic tension in the scene.)
With the crew history stuff, for instance, I was trying to make it a scene that was about Jean-Luc Picard, where he was emotionally with regard to his crew, and why. So the infodump wasn't just an infodump, it was a litany of the lengthy chain of problems that had led Picard to the point where he was uncertain he could ever recapture the effectiveness and rapport of his old crew. Although, granted, it didn't turn out as smoothly as I'd hoped.
As for the Borg briefing, I didn't have any such single unifying theme, but I still tried to filter it through character, with regard to things like Beverly's concern about Picard's reaction to the new Borg threat, Worf's mistrust of T'Ryssa Chen and annoyance at the
Frankenstein nickname, etc. It wasn't a strongly character-driven scene, but at least it had character "business" to liven it up some.
I think that if you're bored by reading exposition in those forms, with character or tension or humor to leaven it, it would be far more boring to read it as just unbroken exposition. And then people might not read it, and that would defeat the purpose of having exposition in the first place.
Hugh's history had to be part of the narrative, and I appreciated that an attempt was made to make it more dynamic via conversation and some of the back and forth, but I wish it had been done via a series flashbacks instead, breaking off in the briefing at one chapter, then progressing through the foundation of Hugh's society, the arrival of the rebels, falling in love, detecting the Einstein, etc, then picking back up in the briefing at the beginning of the next chapter, the preceeding chapter being Hugh's dramatized exposition to Picard and Co. On the other hand, this probably would have required the book be longer, and perhaps disrupted the pacing of the book with its otherwise large chapters.
I simply didn't have time or room for that. I was on a very tight deadline.
Even though you wouldn't necessarily wanted to do it the way you had to do it, you did it well!
