I'm not sure about it being pretentious. I would have to see more of the text below it to come to that conclusion.
Obviously it is not the wisest decision since they have at least pushed one reader to arms length.
That aside when I look at that I see that he is pushing the reader to three questions maybe four.
"John from Regaria was counting his varimases while he noticed a reskat running towards him
Where or what is Regaria
What are varimases and why count them.
What is a reskat and why is one running at him so important.
and of course who is John
Regaria could be his home world or city and he could now be far from there; and varimase could be currency of the world or city he is at-and he's checking his resources; and a reskat could be a wild beast that might only be running at him only if something much larger and predatory were after it.
But I do have to admit that to keep me in the story a lot of that would have to become evident soon in the next few paragraphs.
Agreed. Pretentious is not the word I'd use. But off-putting is off-putting, whatever the word.
While such writing can be incompetent
"smeerping" it can also be part of the essence of SF, which is cognitive estrangement. I was thinking the SFE (speaking of pretentious) had an article on it but they don't. The
novum article is relevant though (and references the term which is flagged as "going to be an article"). For instance, "Scanners Live in Vain" is a great story by Cordwainer Smith which begins, "Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor , and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg was broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to Scan himself." The first dialogue is in the next paragraph in which Martel says to Luci, "I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch." None of this is to be pretentious or confuse the reader for the sake of confusing them, but to intrigue the reader about the mysterious otherness of this fictional world. It's evoking things that don't have a 1:1 correspondence with ordinary reality and so need a new terminology for the new things. As tinkerdan was saying, it opens a flood of questions - what's adjusting your blood, how do you do it, why aren't you doing it? Why are your senses screwed up? Why are you deaf? Why can't you sense your own limbs without scanning? What's scanning? And, most of all, what the hell is cranching?
But such questions are part of the fun and, by the end of the story, you'll know most or all of this, as the story makes the bizarre and never-experienced become more a part of your conceptual furniture - it bends your brain.
But, as I say, a lot of incompetent guys just make up words willy-nilly and/or don't explain them in any aesthetically satisfying way (to paraphrase tinkerdan again - it can't all remain mystifying for long) and it's just junk. And, contrariwise, many SF stories can succeed without being particularly about estrangement or without using that particular method to achieve it. But it is a big part of SF (and fantasy, too, in ways, I suppose) and is a frequently-used method. It's not bad in itself.
Some of these sound great. Can I have book names with those quotes?
#3 is
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.
#6 is
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
I feel like I know #4-5 but they aren't coming to me.
Not sure about #1-2.
Edit: they got to bugging me (especially #5 which I knew I knew). Search engines to the rescue:
#1 seems to be J.G. Ballard's
High Rise.
#2 is Le Guin's
The Left Hand of Darkness (should have known that).
#4 is Simmons'
Hyperion (bleh).
#5 is Doc Smith's
Triplanetary (really should have known that, too).
FWIW, I haven't read #1 and didn't like #4 but the rest are great, IMO.
* Immortal life and humanity
* The future of mankind
* When the protagonist has ethical dilemmas to consider with relation to their decisions
* A mystery which slowly unravels
* Exploration - esp if it involves a mystery like exploring another planet/time period
But do you want happy/sad approaches, high-tech/low-tech, pro/con, simple/complex?
Charles Sheffield considers the first two in at least
Between the Strokes of Night and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Robert Silverberg takes a depressing look at immortality in "Born with the Dead". Olaf Stapledon is famous for his extremely long-range looks at humanity and the cosmos.
Not sure what you mean by "a mystery which slowly unravels" but I'll second Vince on Asimov's robot novels. Also McDevitt's Alex Benedict novels are very homey and not at all pretentious but do feature sorts of archaeological mysteries that are inevitably mixed up in present day crimes ("present" for the futuristic characters, I mean).
Murray Leinster's
Colonial Survey aka
Planet Explorer is a neat, well, planet explorer story series, as is van Vogt's
Voyage of the Space Beagle. I recently read Eric Frank Russell's
Men, Martians, and Machines and even more recently was directed to Joseph Green's
Conscience Interplanetary and Stephen Tall's
The Stardust Voyages.
A novel which nails your third item but which would drive you nuts with weird terminology would be Norman Spinrad's
The Void Captain's Tale, which begins, "I am Genro Kane Gupta, Void Captain of the
Dragon Zephyr and mayhap this is my todtentale." But it's one of my favorite books. Stories like Godwin's famed "The Cold Equations" and Kelly's superb resonance with "Think Like a Dinosaur" also fit well.
Really, there are too many to list - almost everything is about moral conflict and mystery and exploration in one way or another. But those are some.
