More Words, Deeper Hole

Hi, James.

You wrote: I would probably avoid [a] particular style of infodump that he used in at least one book. I like my hard science fiction but a page of mathematics may not be the best way to clue the reader in as to what is happened.

OK -- then, how?

Assuming an author is writing hard SF, and either has the necessary education, or at least has done the requisite, relevant research, it seems to me there are really only about two or three ways or imparting the science to readers -- a thing that (since you are writing hard SF) you probably have to do since [1] it likely is necessary to the advancement of your plot and [2] it is not necessarily likely that your readers will be familiar with it.

The first is the Hoylesque core-dump for readers to wade through. This is like splashing a bucket of dog vomit on the side-walk and asking (or, worse, insisting) that readers stroll through it.

The second is to have lame dialogue where conveniently-stupid-character asks conveniently-knowledgeable-character painfully lame questions, or their equivalent ("Oh, but Dr. Z, can a actually Klystron do that?") as a stand in for the uninformed reader. This is condescending to the intelligence even of the science-ignorant reader, who may well pack in the suspension of disbelief right there, on the grounds that the characters (whatever their redeeming attributes) just got unbelievably [sic] lame.

The third is an accompanying foreword or afterword, a mini-essay if you will.
This is distracting, and risks giving your plot away.

What else is there? If nothing, then you risk either ugliness (1), lameness (2), or plot-spoilers and distraction (3).

What do you think?