Two Writing Styles

Given that we enjoy detailed descriptive passages in Poul Anderson's works, it is interesting to learn that CJ Cherryh's preferred writing style is the precise opposite:

Writing style

Cherryh uses a writing technique she has variously labeled "very tight limited third person", "intense third person", and "intense internal" voice.^[7] In this approach, the only things the writer narrates are those that the viewpoint character specifically notices or thinks about.^[7] The narration may not mention important features of the environment or situation with which character is already familiar, even though these things might be of interest to the reader, because the character does not think about them due to their familiarity.

-copied from here.

This explains why, early in Downbelow Station, a viewpoint character watches spaceships docking at a space station but the process is not described for the readers' benefit. "Intense third person" is extremely effective in narrative passages describing immediate experiences but surely the readers need to be shown the bigger picture elsewhere in a text?

Contrast this view from the porch of an apartment on the edge of an orbiting space station as described by one of the apartment's occupants:

"Space dropped dizzily from the viewport, thin starred black here on the rim. Huge and shapeless - we being still more or less within it - the galaxy streamed past and was lost to sight; we looked toward remoteness."

-Poul Anderson, World Without Stars (New York, 1966), II, p. 12.