Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26146
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The people in your story might not know anything about Earth, but your readers do. You can show lighter gravity by describing things that couldn't happen on Earth -- a person out for a jog bounding high enough to brush tree branches, somebody casually carrying an anvil under one arm (this depends on whether your low-grav folks have lost strength, of course), a game of something like basketball where the basket height is several times the height of the players "to make it a little challenging", and so on. What you describe has to seem perfectly natural to your characters (from their point of view gravity is normal), but has to stand out as unusual to your readers.

The same approach works for other variations -- a casual reference to the second moon rising, to the blue-white glow of the sun, to the scraggly purple brush in the forests of blue-leafed trees, whatever.

Showing means describing and letting the reader draw the conclusions you want him to draw.

Original score: 5