Question about "new" worlds: How detailed do you have to be?

We recently had a discussion of this over at Midnight Muse's blog. I hope she doesn't mind me providing a link.

I'm in favor of bolognium. Name it and move on without explaining, unless you have a concrete foundation in science.

Yeah, I have to echo that: unless you've got a solid scientific or mechanical grasp for how something works, I wouldn't get into details.

If you're trying to keep it grounded in reality, however, what you can do is look at any of the sites that feature "tech trends" and then extrapolate from there. That will at least give you some sort of firm footing to base things on.

The problem also with future tech, and trying to explain it, is that you're stuck at current levels of scientific and engineering understanding. Which means you're limited in how much you can explain something anyways. I always favored the Star Trek approach (not the level you see on the screen, but in there tech manuals and such where they try and explain things): any Trek fan can likely tell you the "science" behind how warp drive works, and in terms of our current understanding of things it makes a certain amount of sense. Which is a long ways from being a blueprint on how to do it, however, and does involve a certain amount of "well, by the 24th century they'll have figured out exactly how to make this work."

There are two different issues here: how much effort you put into building and explaining your world for the benefit of you, the author, and how much of that worldbuilding gets translated onto the written page.

I think you don't want to put too much of that worldbuilding onto the page and into the story. I see that more than I'd like, and, to be blunt, it's awfully boring to stop in the middle of the story and get a dry exposition of the technology and history behind the warp drive or the transporter or whatever.

However, I think you do need to do enough work behind the scenes to be comfortable with the performance, limitations, and experience of your technology.

For instance, let's take slc's Star Trek warp drive example. If you had a "warp drive" in your story, as a reader, I wouldn't want to see a treatise on how it works. However, neither would I want to see it flash by (as, "The ship entered warp drive. John had another bite of cake. Blah blah blah.") You, as the author, need to know some behind-the-scenes details:
Will you characters "feel" anything on engaging warp drive? The reader will expect to know, and the character should report it.
What happens if the drive malfunctions?
What do you see out the window during warp drive?
Are there different speeds? How long does it take to get from place to place?
Is there a time dilation effect?
How much energy does it take?
The answers to these questions might very well affect the story and the plot. The reader doesn't need to know the answer to any of the questions unless it affects the plot, but if (for example) you have a saboteur aboard your warp-speed vessel, I want to know what the stakes are if he were to blow the engines.

Example from my most recently completed novel: My main character was stranded in the middle of nowhere because his coolant injectors were rendered inoperative by a heavy power surge. The engines would have turned the ship into a ball of liquid metal without that coolant, so the safety protocols kicked in and wouldn't let him make the jump to hyperspeed.

IF your story is set on an FTL space ship AND the warp generator is going to break down mid-flight AND your POV char is the ship's chief engineer who has to repair it THEN you probably need to give a fairly detailed description of how FTL works.

On the other hand, if your POV char travels via an FTL space ship to get from important story location A to important story location B, don't even bother with bolognium. Just mention how long the trip takes--a day or a week or a month--as well as how expensive and/or dangerous it is. (That last part goes to the char's attitude about the trip, how motivated he has to be to risk/spend that much.)

OK, those are extreme examples, but they illustrate an important point: If your character would take gadget X for granted, without thinking about how it works or who invented it, then don't write an infodump about it. Instead, just show them casually using it, the same way you use your cellphone.

H. G. Wells never explained how his Time Machine worked. Nor did he have to. It just did, and the story is so finely written that the reader concentrates on the adventures of his lead character, which is what Wells was after. This seminal work of modern SF has always struck me as a good model on which to build. I tend to get bogged down if there's much explanation of "how things work". I don't read SF for that purpose; when I need that kind of stuff, I go to astronomy magazines.

caw

I like the balance in 'The Helliconia Trilogy' by Brian Aldiss - well, it works for me.

Don't forget about context. As FennelGiraffe mentioned, who your POV is makes a huge difference. They'll see and refer to things as that character would. An engineer won't explain how an FTL drive works, but he'll refer to the components or what he's trying to fix or what the problem is just as a mechanic would when he's fixing a car. Readers should always be able to get the gist of what you're saying, but you don't have to stop and spell it out every time. Show it in context and they'll get what you're trying to show.

Of course, if it's an entirely new thing you created and there is no context for it, then you have to do a little more explaining, but try to finds ways to do in within the world you've created. Show it "in context" and use the known to help explain the unknown.