Is this the literary technique backstory?

Question

Maddy and Az told Tally “Not long after the discovery, Special Circumstances paid a visit. They took our data and told us not to look any further or we’d lose our licenses. It was either run away, or forget everything we’d found.”

Answer 1

The example you cite above is backstory, but I'm not sure that backstory would qualify as a literary technique. Every narrative has backstory -- it just means events that happened before the narrative started. I think the literary technique would be exposition. That's how the backstory is told, or exposed (explained) to the reader. Exposition can be in a variety of techniques -- as dialogue, description, short narrative passages, summary etc. Long narrative passages or long summaries are usually clumsy examples of exposition.

I would say that the summary above is not a particularly good example of exposition. Are Maddy and Az speaking in unison? If not, I'd rather see actual dialogue between the characters, or simple (brief) summary.

I really, really like the names, though.