From a literary angle - two books I’ve read that are absolute master classes in this are Italio Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - both do an incredible job of putting you in a series of vivid, fantastical places within a paragraph or two of exposition.
So wild seeing this referenced here, it's a pretty obscure book (of poetry nonetheless), and one my absolute favorites. Cheers to having great taste :)
PS: Small nit: it's "Italo," not "Italio."
The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.
That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
Well that settles that, then.
Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.
But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.
I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.
But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.
I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.
War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.
Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.
It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.
I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.
Per the parent comment, it does a lot with very little. And it's heady and literary and beautiful. Not everyone is into that. But a lot of people are.
They feel juvenile, trying SO hard. Using a different person perspective in one of them to hamfisted effect, as opposed to someone like Tamsyn Muir who integrates that device for good reason and to brilliant effect.
I gave NK a solid try and was appalled at how in the world anyone could think these are engaging.
The combination is fantastically human.
Talk to more people, you'll find they can think too.
Perhaps postcard sized was slight hyperbole, but not by much. All 3 would have been in the bottom 5 of the museum size wise, and it’s a huge museum.
That happened to me some years ago in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, two remarkable pictures particularly come to mind Vermeer's The Milkmaid and a Rembrandt self portrait.
The Milkmaid is comparatively small painting (~18×16" according to Wiki) and I was not only able to view it up incredibly close and in detail but also it was a quiet time for visitors and I had the painting all to myself. I stared at it for minutes in a strange state of amazement brought on by not only how wonderful this Vermeer masterpiece was and that I was looking at it for real and it wasn't a dream but also that I could get so close and do so for so long given the work is worth many, many millions, it's effectively priceless. My experience was even more remarkable given that I was visiting the museum just after Rembrandt's The Night Watch had been repaired, restored and put back on display after a maniac had slashed it with a knife.
The other painting was a Rembrandt self portrait, it was in an alcove all on its own. Again, I had this truly remarkable painting all to myself to view close up. It was an incredible experience, with Rembrandt's eyes staring directly at me it felt as if he was talking to me. It shocked me that a painting that is over 350 years old and painted by someone many generations removed from today could generate such a large emotional response in me.
I consider that particular visit to the Rijksmuseum (I've been there a number of times) as one of the most memorable experiences of my life and I consider it a great privilege that the museum provided me the opportunity to see these remarkable works up close and in depth.
No other book captured the feelings of being 20-something and flirting like reading this. Reading it felt like being right back there again, with all the excitement and anxiety. Highly recommended to anyone.
Unsure how it connects to the notion of a brain filling in the blanks. I thought it was quite "filled in", but maybe my brain did it, and therefore I'm making your point for you :)
It also won the Modern Language Association's top award — the James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book published in 2023.
See also: atomic size vs distance between atoms in any structure, on perceptual levels the visual saccadic movement and how much the brain fills in the gaps.
Nothing is quite something after all.
The electron doesn't actually have a measured radius (in our current theories). QFT describes it as point-like excitation of an underlying quantum field. The only connection between our quantum theories (that is really just slightly hand wavy math) and reality is that our theories can predict the statistics of observing a particle or interaction in a given state. So maybe a slightly more coherent explanation is that for a given region between atoms in solid matter, the probability of observing an electron (or any particle) is extremely small. Its like a quantum mechanical cat who's territory extends across mountains and forests, you're probably not gonna stumble across it on any given day, unlike a house cat that lives in someones apartment. More generally there are no big "lumps" in the wave-functions, it's very thinly spread like too little butter on toast.
The analog equivalent of pixelation.
I paint as a sort of weekly ritual, just 2 hours every Wednesday evening, and did an inept copy of this as my first serious try. Months of staring closely at every little detail of it leave you in a sort of communion with the work and the artist.
One thing you quickly learn is that the old masters were "impressionists" too. If you overwork stuff trying to perfect every shape with hundreds of precise brushstrokes, you end up with a naive, infantile looking painting that feels "unpainterly".
Trying and failing to mimic that single quick brushtroke that fools the eye leaves you in awe, fully appreciating the mastery.
It is a bit like those illusions where one grey looks darker than the other, based on surrounding shadows in the image and what the brain assumes... but the RGB values are the same.
But Vermeer is next level, especially for the time. A growing contingent of historians believe he used camera obscura to achieve the results
But say you write a pop culture hit, people start looking deeper, and the gaps become glaring.
Like the fusion drives in the expanse, it's hand waved on the first read through, but on the second I found that someone had calculated it online (like this https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-expanses-epstein-dr...) and now it kinda ruins the vibe, the author should have chosen something outside of current science (basically magic) or used a technology that's feasible.
Also, the ships fucking explode when they lose magnetic fusion containment...whereas in reality it would just dissipate...
In my current incarnation I'm a fledgling novelist and one of the things I've learned is to trust the audience to 'fill in the gaps'. Although this is probably obvious already to many, the parallel between that and the way that we sort of do that when we look at paintings suddenly hit me.