[2] Indirect exposition, sometimes called incluing, is a technique of worldbuilding in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set.
This can be done in a number of ways: through dialogues, flashbacks, characters' thoughts,[3] background details, in-universe media,[4] or the narrator telling a backstory.
[3] Indirect exposition has always occurred in storytelling incidentally, but is first clearly identified in the modern literary world, in the writing of Rudyard Kipling.
In his stories set in India like The Jungle Book, Kipling was faced with the problem of Western readers not knowing the culture and environment of that land, so he gradually developed the technique of explaining through example.
But this was relatively subtle, compared to Kipling's science fiction stories, where he used the technique much more obviously and necessarily, to explain an entirely fantastic world unknown to any reader, in his Aerial Board of Control universe,[5] starting with the novella "With the Night Mail" (1905).