When you read a book, there will be things you don't understand. I know, it's a broken record. But I keep coming back to this because it matters.
Some of these things are within the world of the book. Why this person did something. What happened to the mouse. Others are external to that world; quotes, allusions, references.
We can subdivide the latter further; at one ends, there is that which is visible and that the reader understands. For anyone of my generation, any variation on, "Luke, I am your father" is going to be noticed, recognized, and understood. Despite the diminished place of the classics today, a reference to a Trojan Horse is still strong enough one can make it with little supporting detail.
Then there are allusions which are visible but not understood. Something sounds significant or like a quote, but they don't recognize the reference. For me, it was "Yngvy is a louse!" as it appeared in Fallen Angels. I simply hadn't read the right book yet.
(Thing is, the idea of not getting it is embedded in the very fabric of that book; it is about obsessive science fiction and fantasy fans using their knowledge as shibboleths to communicate under the noses of an oppressive future government.)
And finally there are allusions which aren't visible at all. Nothing stands out to that reader, at least not this time. I had this experience reading The Stars My Destination; I'd completely missed the Count of Monte Cristo thing, for instance. Finding these is one of the delights in coming back to a book years later, and discovering things you had totally missed.
Obviously this isn't just allusions. This goes for all sorts of references, quotes, historical persons, whatever. Say, a Huck Finn looking Mississippi boy named "Sam," who hopes to one day be a riverboat pilot. Okay, that should be obvious to most people.
It should be obvious that if the reader who gets it feels clever, it is because it wasn't easy. And if it isn't easy, then some readers wont. So getting some and knowing you are missing some is inevitable. Possibly even desirable; you feel smart for getting the ones you did get, and fairly tested by the ones you didn't.
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A big problem is when these are plot-critical. They should never be plot critical. You should never have the reader told the hero has "Learned what Luke had learned" and then base the entire last third of the book on the implied nature of his relationship with the Darth Vader equivalent.
The thing is, how can the reader know they won't be? The biggest risk here is not when the reader never notices, but when the reader spots something, doesn't understand it, knows it has meaning that they didn't grasp, and agonizes that they won't be able to take in the story properly without it.
They should trust the writer, really. They should be able to trust that the reader will never play games with plot-critical information. If it is necessary to understand the story, it will be in plain language. But for some reason the reader doesn't always do so.
And this is where the allusions and quotes and so forth become a problem. The reader knows information is being withheld from them. Not from the "readers of the book" generically, but THEM. This specific reader, who doesn't like the same pop songs as the writer and the writer's little circle of friends and thus is being cut out of something important. The writer is so into sharing their esoteric knowledge with their fan club they are cutting the reader out of their ability to enjoy.
Not saying this can't happen. But why is this the default assumption of so many readers?
My guess at this moment is this is exactly why there are shibboleths. It is about the importance of defining group identity. The reader in question has cultivated that sense of "belongs in my group/doesn't belong in my group" and is quick to identify what they think is an attempt to test them, to ask them for a password, to litmus test them. They expect gate-keeping. They expect a book to be written to exclude them.
But, you know, they aren't entirely wrong.
And that's why I singled out Fallen Angels above. It is in large part a masturbatory exercise in making the facile "Fans are Slans" (another shibboleth) meaningful in a larger (if invented) context. It is a big signal saying, "If you don't know 'There will come soft rains' then you aren't the audience for this book."
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There is in fact this sort of gate-keeping going on in genre. A better way of looking at it, though, is as contract with the reader. It isn't specifically about undefined terms and unfamiliar words but that is how the outside may perceive it.
Science Fiction, and fantasy, have built up legacies of tropes and assumptions and terms. As much as people are complaining about it now, for instance, the term "chainmail" is going to be instantly recognized by an experienced reader. They will form an image, an idea, in their minds, and this saves the writer a great deal of effort.
Because you really can't explain everything. Sure, you could create a future world in which the equivalent niches of teleportation and robots and so on are filled by things that are distinctly different enough to need explanation and probably deserve their own names. It can be done, but it is a very different book than one that gets right to the action.
And a similar effect is in certain areas of historical fiction. If you aren't recognizing typical words used to describe a Regency setting, perhaps you shouldn't be picking up book nine of a twelve-volume Regency Romance.
It gets weirder with, say, the military SF branch of modern science fiction, where certain things are simply assumed and let stood, regardless of whether they make sense outside of the genre. Accept that not just faster-than-light travel but communication is possible, that infantry (with only the barest nod towards combined arms) will continue to rule the battlefield, and nukes are mostly a nuisance. Accept powered armor is a good idea and has no insurmountable technical challenges. Or find something different to read.
When you do dive into an unfamiliar genre, you hopefully do so with a humble acceptance that the problem isn't with the writer, or with the genre they are writing to and the norms of that form, but with you. That this is going to be hard going until you've learned the basics.
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There's a couple of other sneaky aspects to this. One is domain; as touched on above, you feel stupid if your experience is in the wrong domain. Again I think this says more about the reader than the writer, but since the writer works to define the domain for the prospective reader...
The first book of Stross' Laundry series opens with some computer geek references. This is fair warning of one domain; that you are going to get more out of the book if you have a certain bias towards programming/computer lingo and humor, as well as retro-computing and a couple of associated things.
For me, I suspect I flew right over the references to British pop-culture that were also there. It wasn't until I was in the third book when I spotted enough of them to realize they had been all over the landscape. So this is something that could have been a barrier; I could have spotted these too early and been convinced that I wasn't the audience for these books.
The other sneaky factor is that as writers our ability to understand the reader's experience is limited. What I mean in this specific is you hear from people who are on networks with you and thus share similar interests.
YouTube, and Quora, are two gathering-places that reach somewhat outside my usual cultural haunts. Just recognize that there is a super-culture of online/English literate and other, much more subtle gatekeeping going on; algorithms working in the dark to put you in places where you feel at home.
My experience there is both tossing out and encountering from other users what are clearly quotes. On a YouTube comment thread about something not even computer related was something like, "I have no moose but I must scream." And the upvotes said I wasn't the only person to recognize the Harlan Ellison quote. Elsewhere, I did a terrible paraphrase of a line from The Tempest and I got upvotes for it.
And this is the sort of self-filtering we get. It is easy to see that there are people who will get it. Whatever "it" is. What you can't tell is what that proportion is.
***
So is this a problem of writing, or a problem of marketing? Everyone has their own personal limit as to how much they are willing to have to learn on the fly as they read. My own line is somewhere around Eco and Robert Shea; I'm willing to read the truly dense and crazy, but I'd prefer to read something more comfortable. Actually, I'd say Joyce is right over that line for me. I may tackle it some day, is what I am saying.
I can't say this isn't domain specific because I suspect it is. It took me a long time to learn the trick of reading history. I've read fantasy and SF for so long I don't even think about the process. But I am not a terribly active mystery reader. The kinds of things you are supposed to be actively trying to understand in a mystery are things I am not focused on.
Show me a weird term in an SF book and I'll be happy to worry away at it until it finally gets defined. But show me suspicious behavior by a suspect and I'm content to sit back and let the detective figure it out for me.
The point I'm laboriously crabbing towards is this isn't something I'm dealing with in the book I'm editing. Well, not just that book. It is something I need to understand for any book I set out to write.
And it can't be put as simply as "putting too much in" or other such litmus tests. You can't define "too much" -- you can't even define what is a thing! Is Sacre Coure too much? Is Montmarte? Is the Eiffel Tower? Is Paris? If you are writing milSF, can you assume rank structures and ideas like NCO, PT, and Hurry Up and Wait don't need explanation, but kinetic energy is a pill the audience can't swallow?
How can you determine the domains that will be perceived by a reader as a barrier, and when do you actually want to accept those as barriers? Because like it or not, every genre has and needs a language and an assumed truth and you can't make a book serve all readers without making it serve all of them poorly.
I don't know. I do know why the watermelon was there...two different reasons, one internal to the text, the other external (and the second I find more interesting). And this example, too, forms a sort of test. Because the audience that was right for that movie responded positively to the watermelon -- even though it is never explained within the confines of the movie itself.
(There is an argument here that Buckaroo Banzai was specifically placed in that mythic space where it is staged as if it comes out of an existing canon already familiar to the audience. The first Star Trek movie demonstrated this on a canon and a fandom that did exist. The Road Warrior did this really well, although I am not sure it intended to -- it may have been a side effect of the Western template and general mythologizing within that particular script.)
(And can you tell I am now at Volume Six of The Tardis Eruditorium? Yeah. Post-post-post literary analysis of the evolution of Doctor Who in a psycho-geographic mode. Say that five times fast!)
At the moment, though, all I can say is that I'd rather have the history in my "Athena Fox" stories and try to find the audience for that, then gate-keep myself by taking out whatever makes them distinct.
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