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Some books have a way of transporting the reader into a very definite world — a time and place so real it might as well have come from your own life — but it didn’t. How does this happen?
It’s kind of a magic trick, really. I don’t think it happens because the writer was skilled enough to use exactly the right verbs, adjectives, and metaphors, or that they engaged enough sensory details, although obviously those tools are important.
No, I think it’s more like triggering a hallucination in the reader based on our shared reality. The right detail presented at the right time is enough for our brains to fill in the rest.
The really weird thing is that it works for worlds we’ve never actually seen. But that’s a topic for another day…