The texture of a story

Re-reading Christopher Evans' Writing Science Fictiin book, I came across his description of the texture of a story.  He says that texture consists of a mixture of description, dialogue, action, reflection, and exposition.  The combination of all these factors determines the texture of the work, how vividly, and with how much detail, the world is brought alive.

Description in SF can be problematic.  When we're describing totally new worlds nothing can be taken for granted.  Where we might talk about a Porsche or a cinema in our present-day world and everyone knows what we mean (at least, in the developed and moneyed west), the equivalents might not be so obvious in the world of the future.  We often have to describe what would be everyday items.  We might also want to use new jargon.  We know what an ansible is now, but nobody did when Ursula le Guin invented it.  

With dialogue, we have to avoid info-dumping ideas and backstory.  Language will have changed in the future and there will be new buzzwords, but we have to strike a balance between newness and readability.  Sometimes we will have to describe an everyday object casually mentioned by a character.  

In action scenes we have to strike a balance between moving the story forward and describing in enough detail what is going on.  But even in the future a boat will remain a boat, and we can describe familiar things in familiar ways.  

We have to be careful when characters are reflecting on something not to use the opportunity as an info-dump.  But if skilfully handled, having a character thinking about all the changes that have taken place since the Emperor seized power a year ago, can be an effective device for telling the reader necessary history.

Add all these ingredients to the story pot, give them a good stir with your own choice of vocabulary, sentence structure and syntax, and you've created the unique texture of your story.