The image of a world

One of the things SF writers have to do is fully describe their world.  It's different from the one we live in today,  so we have to get across how it differs from our own. And that means using imagery,

You can juxtapose images for effect.  Something fragile can be contrasted with something big and chunky, like the tiny flower growing at the foot of an enormous tree.  The tree shades it from the sun, but does it also garden the flowers for food?  Then maybe you have a planimals rather than a straight tree, and the way you show the tree tending the flowers should include imagery that suggests that.

Creating imagery doesn't mean peppering your stories with adjectives and adverbs.  It means choosing strong, descriptive words.  I have a weakness for writing sunset and sunrise scenes, and frequently on my first drafts I have a long list of words describing the colour of the sky.  Cutting it to a shorter, less flowery description forces me to look for more accurate words.  Instead of bright blue sky I might end up with a luminous azure dawn.  Instead of a red and orange sunset the sky will be streaked with crimson and tangerine.  

We have to remember also that the scene is being described through the eyes of our viewpoint character - or it should be.  How does that character respond to the scene?  Does it bring back sad or happy memories?  In the third Panthera book, Death Plain, I've explored a little of Ren's childhood.  Her mother was also a wildlife conservationist, and Ren learned her love of the open savannah from her.  But now she's forced to go back to the place where her mother was murdered and deal with the dark hole in her feelings about her mother's death.

But we need to weave imagery into the action of our story, so at the start of Panthera : Death Spiral I have Ren moving through the golden dawn of a savannah sunrise while taking a dead kingcat cub for examination.  The place and the subject of the story are woven together in that scene, but I hope I've also conveyed a little of the beauty of that vast wilderness.

Seeing the scene through a character's eyes, and having that character use all their senses, are powerful ways of making the imagery of a world immediate and real for the reader.