Is our writers learning?

Reading David Gibbin’s Mask of Troy has me thinking some more about exposition.
The concept of the novel is that the archeologist/series hero’s explorations at Troy tie in (though not very well) with a scheme to obtain some kind of Nazi germ warfare weapon. It’s not well executed (the attempts to parallel the destruction of Troy with the threat of modern WMDs seemed awfully forced——and show, as a friend of mine observed, that interpretations of the Trojan War tend to reflect modern concerns), but it was still an instructional book to read.
Like City of Bones (mentioned at the link above) there’s a lot of exposition in this book, but it worked a lot better for me. In contrast to the overly familiar mythos of the first book, Mask of Troy has lots of discussion of Troy, archeology and history that were fresh; even the material I’m fairly sure was made up blended in pretty well.
So the first lesson to draw is: Exposition is most interesting when it’s stuff that your readers haven’t seen.
The second lesson: Even stuff that I haven’t seen gets dull if the discussion keeps going. And it did. For quite a while (plus there were spots where the characters wound up telling each other stuff they already should have known).
Third lesson: Tension helps. One advantage City of Bones‘ exposition had was that the explainer and explainee didn’t particularly get along, so there was a thread of conflict winding through the scenes. Here it’s much more amiable discussion.
(In extreme cases, tension can make anything more riveting. A few hundred words about washing a sinkful of dishes isn’t terribly interesting; if someone’s going to give the protagonist an electric shock for every dish that isn’t spotless, it’s a lot more riveting).
I’m beginning to feel a little more confident about the talky scenes in Brain From Outer Space. The fact that people are sitting around and talking a lot isn’t a drawback. The important thing is that no individual scenes run too long; that the discussion is interesting; and that it’s tense.
I think I can pull that off.