Living the world - where's the restaurant?

I'm rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird this week, and finding that I don't know my way about my world anything like well enough.  I'm beginning to wonder how I ever wrote the novel in the first place.

Two-thirds of the action is set on an orbital shipyard. I knew that it was in geostationary orbit above the planet Cathal, and I knew that it had three, differently-sized rings, attached to a central cylinder.  And that it looked like an outsized, multi-levelled snowflake.  But that was almost all. Not much to go on.

Looking back now, I wonder how my characters ever found their way around the shipyard.  All I had as an aide-memoire was a list of functions, organisations, and companies who occupied the spaces.  When I came to re-write the novel I realised that it suffered from my usual problem.  There wasn't enough description, not enough detail of the setting.  And I've realised that one reason why I didn't describe things was because I didn't know what my characters were seeing.

I've got better though.  In my novel Genehunter the characters are travelling from east to west across the continent.  They pass through tropical and temperate biomes, and I needed to know when one ended and the next began.  That allowed me to add touches like Aris waking up cold and needing her heavier jacket because she was out of the tropical biome.

Now when I invent a planet I work out the details of its surface before I begin to write.  But with another old novel, Auroradawn, that plan was only an ink outline of the land masses.  The trouble with that is that I don't know when alpine meadows segue into temperate grassland, and where the snow line is on cold Berenger continent.  So now I've made a more detailed, coloured-in map.  I colour in the various types of vegetation in different shades of green and golds.  I show mountains as dark brown masses. Blue rivers snake through the forests and savannahs, dictating where the settlements should go.

I now make my maps with watercolour pencils, the colours wetted to blend together in a watercolour portrait of my world's surface.  And now I know exactly where the boundaries between biomes are, and I have no excuse for under-describing my setting.

Describing the world in an eyeblink

One of the challenges for SF writers is describing the alien worlds your characters land on.  Even if   the world is Earth-like and the atmosphere is one that humans can breathe unaided there will be subtle differences from our home world.

The trick is to get the amount of description right.  Your characters might well be overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of a new world, but you don't want the reader to be overwhelmed too. And that means being selective in the details.

When I first wrote about Latoya in Eyemind I had the story starting with my main character Keri Starseer land on-planet at sunset and looking around her at the landscape.  It read like a travel brochure in my early drafts, and had to go.  Now I've dispensed with that whole scene and the novel starts with her mid-way through a briefing with her new employer.

We have to describe our world in an eyeblink.  In Panthera : Death Spiral I focus on the golden light and the dust of a savannah dawn.  In Panthera : Death Plain the setting is rainforest, and I sketch out its size by having Ren look down on an unbroken forest of green below her as she's  flying into the reserves.

Being specific helps us to fix the scene in the reader's mind quickly.  Something is not red, but ruby, crimson, or claret.  In Eyemind I describe a palace as being large and built of soft pink sandstone.  That's all the description I need for this minor location.  And when Keri is captured she is put into a cold cave with no light where she hears things scuttling about that remind her of large deadly spiders. I don't need any more description here.

Often the scenery will be familiar to your characters.  As we don't take great notice of places we know well, neither will your characters.  The details will pass by in an eyeblink.