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.

The ansible

It's hard to imagine SF without the ansible now. The concept has been around for many years since Ursula le Guin invented it. Curiously, the story in which she did wasn't about the effects of the technology, it was about culture clash when members of two very different societies meet.

But later writers have taken and shaped her invention to their own purposes.  I'm thinking specifically  of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books.  Much of the action there revolves around messages sent instantaneously by ansible, or around anisbles being destroyed and solar systems being out of contact.

I've adopted the technology myself, specifically in Starfire, where Ria Behar, my tradeship  captain, is jumping about the galaxy in search of her missing uncle.  Like FTL, I find it hard to imagine the SF genre without instant interstellar communications.

Part of our desire for the ansible is wish-fulfilment.  It would allow us to reach out to the stars in a far more immediate way than we can today, when a signal we send to a robot spacecraft takes minutes or hours to reach it.

But instantaneous communication would also greatly aid warfare, as Elizabeth Moon demonstrates in the Vatta's War books.  Pirates equipped with shipboard anisbles would have an advantage over other fleets, and the potential for destruction is huge.  As always, we need to be careful what we wish for.