Precise description - bringing the world alive

I've been thinking about story settings a lot recently.  That's partly because I'm leading a session on world-building for Havant Writers' Circle in September, and partly because I'm using it as a sample teaching session for an upcoming interview.

So I've had to return to my decade-old notes and update them.  Think again about what makes a stunning setting.  Certainly I know it isn't throwing in every detail under the sun - or suns, if you're a science fiction writer like me.  But it could involve describing the type of sun my planet revolves around.

Which might be completely different from our own familiar yellow Sun.  A quick glance at a Herzsprung-Russell diagram shows that our Sun is a very ordinary yellow star slap-bang in the middle of the Main Sequence.  But that's not the only colour that stars come in.  And they can be dwarfs, or giants, too.

So choosing a different coloured star will change every other detail of my planet.  The predominant foliage colour could be dark red, or a mixture of permanent Fall shades, or nearly black.  A moment's thought about these and I realise that photosynthesis as it has evolved on Earth probably won't work for these plants.  But, using the principles of convergent evolution, I can surmise that they'll have evolved their own variation on the process.

So how to convey such a world?  One of the best descriptions of an alien sky I've ever read is in Katherine Kerr's Polar Ciry Blues.  You can feel the dangerous heat of the day, the sense of being too close to that red giant star.  In my own Genehunter I've created a savannah of dark red grasses, and in The Code River the grasses are a cool blue-green.  And it's that precise description of details that brings the world alive.  In a short story I've just finished I have a vivid violet dawn casting highlights over everything.

Different colours, different smells, and textures, all add to the precise description of a world.  In The Code River Chita, my main character, is half big cat.  So as you'd expect, scent plays a large part in her world.  That's not only the scents of the natural world around her, but the scents of the humans too.  She can smell their emotions.  

And it's in using these precise details that we can really bring a setting alive.