At First Sight

CS Lewis wrote somewhere that only the first visit to another world is of interest to an imaginative reader. Poul Anderson often writes about other planets that have become very familiar to their visitors or to colonists - although he always presents fresh sensory descriptions of scenes on Earth or elsewhere.

Here he does describe what it is like to see a new environment for the first time:

"You always undergo that shock of first encounter... Often you need minutes before you can truly see the shapes around, they are that alien. Before, the eye has registered them but not the brain."
-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 3-22 AT p. 8.

Similarly, Lewis' Elwin Ransom looks out from a landed spaceship for the first time ever at the surface of Malacandra (Mars):

"He was looking out through the manhole.
"Naturally enough all he saw was the ground - a circle of pale pink, almost of white; whether very close and short vegetation or very wrinkled and granulated rock or soil he could not say."
-CS Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 1-144 AT 7, p. 34.

When he gets his head and shoulders out of the manhole and his hands on the soil:

"The pink stuff was soft and faintly resilient, like india-rubber; clearly vegetation...
"He gazed about him and the very intensity of his desire to take in a new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are."
-ibid., pp. 34-35.

He sees something flat and light blue before he recognizes it as liquid coming nearly to his feet. He is by a lake or river - one of the "canals."

Here, Anderson and Lewis present identical descriptions of initial perceptions of new environments.