The following is an excerpt from:
Delany, Samuel R. "Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction". The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2009, 17-28.
Available to you via the Libraries in print or as an ebook.
Let us look at the development of one of the narrative techniques that practically alone supports science fiction: expertise—that method by which an author, deploying a handful of esoteric facts, creates the impression that he, or more often a character in his story, is an expert in some given field. It was formulated as an outgrowth of French Naturalism by a writer who began as a younger disciple of Zola, Joris Karl Huysmans. He brought the technique to pitch in his novel A Rebours, published in 1884, a year after Treasure Island, a year before She. But where the Naturalists employed exhaustive research to give density to their endless chronicles of common people at common professions, Huysmans used comparatively superficial research to give an impression of thorough familiarity with a whole series of bizarre and exotic subjects, including Late Latin literature, horticulture, and perfumery, to list only a few.
In addition to origins in the Naturalist approach, Delany also traces Huysmans's acquisition of this technique to Edgar Allan Poe, whose works— in the translations of Charles Baudelaire— had an immense impact on French writers of Huysmans's generation. Particularly, Delany points to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "a work which Poe dots with much nautical expertise to make his sailor narrator convincing, on a thoroughly unreal voyage" (Delany, p.18)— and which, "In A Rebours, […] is several times mentioned by name" (ibid).