I've been reading
Robin "I can't believe she's not that wet Megan Lindholm" Hobb's
Shaman's Crossing. It is, of course, rather good.
What's interesting is that she spends the first third of the book just setting up the world and the character's place it in. There only two episodes which contain live conflict and odd resolution, and only one of them kicks off the rest of the story. Mostly, she's doing the dreaded
storyteller cut - providing information that will be significant later. The hellish thing is,
it works.
Mostly, when fantasy authors do this, it sucks goats so badly that there's a queue of horny billygoats right down the hall and into the street. You know the kind of wince-making-heir-to-Tolkien-my-ass kind of thing I mean. Reading it is like having a monologue playing in your head. "Look,
elves in the woods. And here's a
mysterious stranger. And there are
rumblings on the border." I give old, established authors (who might get around to some sort of story) about two chapters of this rubbish before I quit.

Robin Hobb, on the other hand, gets away with it. She does this by dishing out the setup in contradictory layers, which is to say it's presented to the reader in a string of reversals not unlike an actual plot.
For example:
Civilised guys are nice, but they oppress the barbarians, but they ostensibly do it for plausible altruistic reasons, but the romantic barbarian way of life is gone, but the barbarians are all misogynist headhunting bastards anyway, but you can only understand them in context, but...On it's own this isn't enought. Just like a proper story, the flipflop chain of exposition needs to be interesting, and have emotionl impact.
In rare cases - especially in comedy - interesting is enough. Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Galaxy is full of whacky infodumps which, not only have no emotional impact, they don't even have much to do with what passes for his plot. Unfortunately, interesting isn't usually enough. Unlike in historical fiction and modern thrillers,
the reader knows that you're just making stuff up. They don't
a priori really care about your unicorn breeding customs.
Mostly, we find stories compelling because they engage our emotions. They usually achieve this by either appealing to universal themes, or by getting us to identify with a character who will experience the emotions for us. Hobb's extended setup does both. On the one hand, she raises issues of imperialism, racism, and challenges our cultural relativism. On the other, she makes all this matter to the protagonist. So, despite wading through pages and pages of descriptive setup, we're hooked... for a while at least.