The four-dimensional agorab has dimensionally morphed

I can hear you thinking "what is she on about?"  And that's the point.  Even though we're writing science fiction we still have to make ourselves understood.  And that means we have to find ways of describing our worlds and their creatures in ways our readers can understand.

I'm thinking of one much-feted SF book that is up for several awards in 2014 that left me feeling totally cold.  Part of that was because I wasn't fully engaged with the world.  And part of that was because multiple first-person viewpoints were continually jumping about the galaxy.  I'd only just worked out who was speaking and where they were before the writer jerked me off to another location with another character.

I've long had a problem with this issue of form over function in SF short stories.  I read extracts from stories in magazines and wonder why they got published.  Quirky viewpoints and obscure descriptions seems to win out often over simple storytelling.

Which brings me back to the four-dimensional agorab.  I have no more idea of what it is than you have.  It probably describes a piece of future tech, maybe alien tech.  But the point is that if I, or you, as the writer don't have a good idea of what our tech does no amount of alien-sounding words will make it convincing,

Part of the appeal of Star Wars is its used universe look.  Yes, there are anti-gravity drives, force fields, and FTL interstellar travel, but all that is everyday to the characters who inhabit that universe.  It's the equivalent of us turning on our laptop or iPad today.

We couldn't have imagined television three hundred years ago, and we can't even begin to imagine what tech we will have invented three hundred years into the future.  The pace of current tech development is so fast that, were we to see 300 years into the future, we wouldn't understand much about it.

But there is a way through this.  We have to remember that tech is invented for a purpose.  Find the need the tech is there to serve and you have the key to inventing something useful.  Remember the invention of the ansible?  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books relies heavily on that tech.  The stories wouldn't work without that technology.

And that's the key,  Make your tech serve some purpose and you'll already have gone a long way towards getting the reader to understand it,