Recording the future

We're always told to write about what we know, but that presents a problem for science fiction writers.  After all, we're inventing a future that has not yet happened, or writing about an alternate history past or parallel world that we can't visit.

I think we need to approach the task of creating a brave new world by adopting the standpoint of a recorder.  We have to become some kind of journalist or reporter and exist within our fictional world, bringing back its insights for our readers.

We physically inhabit the world of our story through the eyes and bodies of our viewpoint characters. We become that person while we are writing in their viewpoint.  We take on their gender, their knowledge of their world.  We see the action through the reference frame of their beliefs and values, loves and hates.  We need them to show us who their friends and enemies are.  Who do they worship?  Do they fear their gods and goddesses, or has religion been banned by the authorities on their world?

What if we were to step into a garden in their world?  What plants would we see, and what colours?  What scents would your characters pick up?  Particularly around food, scent plays a big part in making it appealing or otherwise.

If you have human characters landing on a world like Pandora they're going to feel very small.  The trees will be massive, like Hometree, and the people might be ten feet tall like the Na'vi.  Humans landing on such a world might be considered children.  It might be difficult to negotiate a trade treaty with such aliens if they considered the first contact team to be young children,

Our recording of our alien world needs to be channeled through the senses of the characters living on it.  And if they are aliens they might have more senses than us.  They could be telepathic, and normally speak mind to mind.  Perhaps that ability allows then to interpret the reactions of the flora on their world.  The buzzing sound a stand of trees makes when it first sees humans might be interpreted them as indicating the trees' fear.

Or perhaps they can smell each other's emotions.  Perhaps learning to mask their emotion-scents might be their equivalent of lying to each other.  Without special tech to interpret these scent-emotions humans would be at a major disadvantage on such a world.  I explored the idea of a chemical language in my short story The Scent of Other Lives, where planimal 'trees' talk using scents.

Using our characters as recorders of our worlds brings our story alive and makes the reader share their experiences.  And in the end that's what the reader wants to do, to feel they are part of our story.