What are some ways to make absurdity of certain ideas in fiction more palatable?
I am writing a science-fiction short story where there are a lot of pseudoscientific ideas being dealt constantly. I was wondering how to reduce the absurdity of some of those ideas using literary techniques.
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I wrote some steampunk. In the plot, there were some elements that the reader should take as novelty, and they were presented with great emphasis. Other elements were supposed to be common in the world, and they were just given just as you would mention a spoon when eating a soup. If I needed to describe something, I used metaphors and comparisons to things of our world.
I described unusual mechanical coaches as treading rhinos, or as an angry mob stomping with their feet. I gave just a few elements of their design that were needed to the story, so that the reader would know that there was a front window and one line of cushioned seats inside. Similarly, a submarine was a barrel, emptied from the good whiskey and filled with hissing and whirring contraptions; or as a squid, probing the Ocean's underworld, searching for prey. A self-speaking box, on the other end, was the novelty of this worlds, and I described it with as many details as I could: its shape, its colour, the ruggedness of its surface, and the chills it gave when talking. After it became familiar, it became just 'the strange box', or 'the voice in the box'.
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