The right degree of familiarity

It's always a challenge when we're writing SF with an unfamiliar culture and tech to get across the story to the reader.  The characters who inhabit that world know what a whergleflump is, and what it does.  But the reader, looking in on their world, doesn't.  This is the challenge of providing the right degree of familiarity with the world for the reader so that he or she doesn't get lost in it.

We have to balance the need to explain what a piece of tech does, or what a culture believes, with the requirement for the characters to just exist in their world. You or I don't go around every day noticing the telephone sat on our side table at home, or thinking about our laptop, except when we want to use it.  Those things just exist in our world, as tools for our use.  And so it will be with the tech of the future.  The characters who live there won't bat an eyelid twice at the fusion reactor in their neighbourhood.

How do we explain things without resorting to the dreaded "As you know, Professor," info-dump in dialogue?  One very common device is to use the "idiot abroad" mechanism, the stranger in town who doesn't know either, and needs things explained to him/her.  That gives the reader a chance to explain puzzling things, hopefully in swift-moving bits of dialogue while the characters are doing something.

It sometimes seems to me that SF authors get away with bamboozling their readers far too much.  They even get rave reviews for how difficult their books are to understand.  Stuff that.  Call me old-fashioned, but if you set out your stall as a storyteller, I damned well want you to tell me a story.  All of it, with enough detail so that I can understand it.

After all, we choose to become storytellers.  Nobody forces us to write.  So I want you to tell me stories I can understand.  I want you to get the balance right between familiarity and strangeness and the unknown.  That is the art of the accomplished SF storyteller.