Getting into the story

SF stories are about strange worlds and strange people, and that means the reader can't just jump in and expect everything to be the same as it is today on good old Earth.

We as writers of SF have to handle the tricky problem of describing our world and its people, and showing our readers how it works.  It's a delicate balancing act.  We don't want to overwhelm readers with descriptions of strange places and cultural rituals, but we do need to tell them enough up front to get a handle on what's going on in that place.  We have to introduce the rules of our universe early on in a story, but not in a massive info-dump.

Naming key people, objects, and concepts helps.  Naming our viewpoint character gives us a way into that world, and we need to tell the reader the bare bones of who he or she is. What species, what their role is, what they're doing in that place at that time all have to be imparted to the reader quickly.

But part of the joy of SF stories is that they don't over-describe.  We get just enough information at the start to drag us into the story.  If the reader doesn't know what a piece of tech does straight away they trust the writer to reveal the information when it's needed.  Perhaps that's what makes reading SF difficult for people new to the genre.  Certainly I've had many critiques from non-SF readers wanting to know more detail up front, detail an accomplished SF reader either assumes, or is willing to wait to find out.

But our readers will expect our descriptions to be literal, not metaphors.  We're in a strange world, we have to describe it in a straightforward way.  We're willing to wait for some information, but the information must be straightforward when we get it.  It means we have to be careful to describe things in a straightforward way until we've got the world of the story established.

We need to weave descriptions of places, cultures, and people into the action.  Establishing the story is more a case of dropping a sentence or two of detail into ongoing action than it is stopping to describe the view.  Getting into an SF story is a tricky balance between too much strangeness and not enough, intriguing the reader, and baffling them.  But that challenge is one of the things that makes SF such a joy to write.