"As you know, Professor..."

These are the words any science fiction reader dreads seeing in a story.  They signal that a massive  info-dump in dialogue is about to begin.  As SF writers, we have to be far more subtle than that about how we build our world.  We need to know all about its geography, ecosystems, and geopolitics, but. that doesn't mean our readers do.

Just as the tech of the future is familiar to the people who use it, so is the scenery to the people who live in it.  Which means they don't go around noticing its every detail all the time.  We have to be selective about what we tell our readers.  We need to choose the information we give them on the basis of its relevance to our story.

Long descriptive paragraphs telling the reader about your world are out.  I did that in early versions of Eyemind, justifying the details on the basis that Keri was new to Latoya and as an artist she'd notice those things.  But the leisurely description of the sunset was slowing down the story, so it had to go.

All the descriptions of the tall purpletrees, the blueshell paths, the crimson sunset and brightly-coloured birds had to go.  They weren't relevant to the story.  But the scene at the end of chapter one when Keri gets trapped inside a very nasty interactive artwork are very relevant, and I've added more details of that in each rewrite.  It's relevant to the story because it shows how dangerous the artworks are, and shows that the contract she's signed up might be dangerous.

The novel now starts with her half-way through a briefing where she's learning about the suspect interactive artworks.  That could have been a classic case of "as you know, Professor", but I got round that by making Keri new to Latoya and an outsider.  So the briefing that's telling her what's going on tells the reader too, within the action of the scene.  The professor isn't being lectured to.