The wind on my face

One of the biggest challenges an SF writer faces is making the world we create and put on the page come alive for the reader.

We need to make the world seem real, and building up this picture in the reader's mind is best done in a straightforward way.  Have confidence in your story, and remember that the reader is willing to suspend belief while they read your tale. The reader is willing to believe anything we tell them, so long as that story world isn't just plain stupid or inconsistent.

How do we give the stamp of realness to our world?  By knowing about it in glorious colour.  We need to know its geography, its culture, its history, its languages.  The more we've worked out these, the more convincing our descriptions of the everyday of that world will be.  We need a sense of the history of the world, both geologically and culturally.  The reader might have been plonked down in the middle of the action, but that action, and that world, have been in existence for a long time before we came to them.  Or at least, the writer needs to give the impression that they have.

Keeping language simple is one way to get your world accepted.  Keep names simple and consistent. Anything that looks unpronounceable should go. In some of my early novels I fell into the common trap of creating aliens with names containing lots of apostrophes. Thankfully, I've abandoned that now.  In my young adult novel Geneship, the alien leader is called Yull.  Short and simple.  The same goes for  dialogue.  Yes, there'll be a few new slang words in your world, but a house is still a house, a city a city, a boat a boat.  There's no reason to call them anything else.

And see the world through the eyes of your viewpoint character.  If there's a storm brewing, get her to feel the freshening breeze and the drop in temperature, see the people around her scurrying about bringing livestock into barns for safety, putting up the shutters at the house windows.

The more you can get the reader to sense the wind on her face, the more real your story world will feel to them.

Seeing through other eyes

One of the major reasons why we write is to make sense of the human world.  But science fiction writers know that sometimes the best way to comment on human culture and behaviour is to see it through other eyes.

Choosing to narrate a story from a viewpoint other than human can shake us up and get us to question and challenge the way things are in our own world. In my youg adult novel Geneship I have a race of intelligent big cats with language, culture, and history.  They are clearly as intelligent as the human research team, yet their young have been exploited by humans in inhumane ways.  in that book one of the viewpoints is that of an alien leader, who gets to comment on human society.

In my Panthera books I returned to one of my favourite themes, artificial intelligence.  I combined it with my favourite animals, big cats, and have a sentient AI in cat form.  Pan is great for observing human culture. He notes that we put our best security where we have our stuff, and he wonders why we amass so much stuff when we all die and leave it behind.

In my short story The Scent of Other Lives (in my short story collection Otherlives) the trees are sentient planimals that can move their branches and communicate In a simple way with the humans who come to their world.  They save my human hero from a flood by flexing their branches and lifting his skimmer up into its branches until the waters recede.  

In my novel Snowbird I created Sponges.  They are organic pebble-like structures living on the surface of a dusty Mars-like planet.  They are a group-mind, linked together by threads.  And they've been there for many years.  But now humans have come along and want to terraform their world.

The increasingly intelligent AIs we are creating might end up doing more than just maintaining our tech,  they might end up running it, deciding what content goes on there and what doesn't.  Perhaps it will be AIs who eradicate pornography from the internet, guardian AIs who hunt it down and delete it.

Other eyes can be organic or manufactured.  They can be the eyes of animals or a house, or even the "eyes" of a black cloud.  Switching viewpoints away from humans can be a powerful device for challenging and examining our culture.