Your expectation on a scifi/fantasy

[hauntedbarrow]

I tend to like vagueness and a sense of mystery or a lack of total understanding of things in fantasy. A lot of people have conflicting views of the world and how it works, and it only makes sense that throwing magic or fantastical elements into it would provoke different understandings and interpretations. One of my favorite bits of the Earthsea novels was Ged coming back from wizard school and telling his original teacher what the archmage there told him, only for Ogion to go "what? that's not how magic works." And it doesn't feel like one's wrong and another's right, they're just two people who interpret magic differently and it feels natural and that adds a sense of scale and depth to the world.

 

[Pixytokisaki14]

Lots of Worldbuilding, naming devices that do certain things, making cool characters while implementing said devices to their bodies etc. Sci Fi is pretty hard to write unless you're well versed in technology and naming things.

 

[melchi]

I expect the author to have at least a general idea of the things that it would take to accomplish what happens in their story. At the very least I expect there to not be contradictions.

Like for example, in mech touch they can 3d print most anything. This is a handwave to whole technology sectors. I guess that is okay, but at the same time, one of the big bads is a conglomerate that makes runs a chip foundry for the star nation. It begs the question, why do they even have foundries if they can 3d print microchips?

another thing that got me was this one story where they get a starship and have to build out a industry and introduce technology to get humanity to the stars to defend against possible invaders or something like that. So, cut-to and they play paintball, and a very secure island compound in some far off, isolated island becomes where they manufacture chips, ship drives, advance hull plating, zero point energy, the works. And they have it all done in a year.

TSMC has been building in AZ for 4 years now, and I still don't think they have their plant online. Trying to build something with no infrastructure and no existing logistical network would be super hard mode. Also, they were being super secretive to keep governments from stealing on the intellectual property. It just is a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Having high suspension of disbelief in sci-fi is bad for that genre in general IMO.

 

[Hanne]

I think the first thing I want (and to a degree expect) is for it not to be explained in much detail. Many stories, especially isekais, attempt to give an explanation how the whole world looks, and that isn't strictly a bad thing, but it takes away from the unknown and the mystery.

Some other stories don't really reveal how the whole world looks like, but present it all in an unsophisticated way that robs it of the wonder of an alien world - and that, again, isn't exactly a bad thing, it works very well in contemporary and slice of life stories, but in other cases may just grate with the tone of the story.

What an immersive worldbuilding entails to me is its locality - it doesn't attempt to explain what's going on in general, or somewhere far away, if focuses on then and there, and the whole wider picture is for the readers to figure out, as if they were a participant in the story themselves.

If there's something I would want fleshed out, it would probably be the history. Ideally not presented directly, but shown through locations, events, and characters. Every buffon can say there was a huge war somewhere, but if there was, it has to have left a ton of traces and remains visible to the readers, not only in the world itself, but also in the characters' behavior and words - that's way harder to do, but it makes a huge impact. Same thing with religion, with culture.

I think I did this by accident. Not sure it's up to your standard tho

 

[Garon]

For me, magic or skafi should work for the story and characters. If they are not involved in the story, they rather serve more as background. That sucks for me.