Form: Can it help or hinder exposition in a story and the world around said story?

In science fiction literature, and literature in general, form can really hinder or help a story in terms of its presentation to the reader and how much the reader can understand what is happening. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The New Atlantis”, she implores a first person narrative, with snippets of future characters asking what happened to the original main characters. I believe this is an interesting tactic, but it ends up providing no context for the story, in my opinion, and I believe she should have opened the world to a little more exposition instead and it would have brought me in more as a reader. Throughout the course of the story, there are subtle hints to the world not being the way it should be, such as when Belle describes the “National Forest Preserve” as the “…largest forest left in the United States…” (Guin, 318). The reader is then left to wonder what happened to the United States to have only one large forest, and with more details coming through such as Phil’s invention to harness solar radiation as energy and Belle even possibly being arrested for “unreported pregnancy” (Guin, 335) the reader must try and put together the pieces of what has happened in the world and caused the government and such to be this way. Personally, I’m not a big fan of this as I find heavy world building a much better way to talk about things in a story and while this creates a certain picture the way Guin does it, it most certainly creates a blurry one. In “Bloodchild”, a short story by Octavia E. Butler, she also provides a first person narrative in a story about long legged, almost centipede like aliens who use humans as hosts to bear their children, and then patch them up again. The story is presented from the view of a child, Gan, as somebody who was chosen by his T’lic alien T’Gatoi, to bear her children when the time comes. Now when exposition is needed to find out how humans came to be on this planet in their “Preserve” and used as these hosts Gan just thinks about what happened and explains it, such as firearms being illegal in the preserve because “ There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established – Terrans shooting T’lic, shooting N’Tlic” (Butler, 12) and this perfectly establishes the world and tells me, as the reader what happened. What I’m basically saying is worlds should be built, to an effect, and the form of the story and the narrative can either help with that, such as “Bloodchild” or hinder that, such as with “The New Atlantis”. 

Le Guin, Ursula K. The New Atlantis. 1975. Text. 

Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild. Davis Publications Inc, 1995. Text.