Would this interest you? (Sci-fi...)

[deeaa]

I've just finished writing a sci-fi novel and have to start looking at companies and options to offer it to. I haven't much of a clue how to start, except that I guess I'll just start by sending my manuscript to Penguin books at first and see what they say.

Here's a couple of the first pages of the book...what say you, does it seem like it could be interesting to an editor? You?
The book deals basically with evolution, morality and is a dystopian vision with lots of genealogy etc. references but also includes action and suspense.

Any comments welcome..


A little, scrawny boy in a tight, ragged protective suit adorned with crudely mended rips and tears stared down a dark opening in the ground, fruitlessly trying to see into its depths. He lifted his round, cracked sun visor and kneeled, squinting his dark eyes that had grown pinkish from the constant irritation from the omnipresent, powdery dust that penetrated any simple filters he could devise.

The hole had not been easy to notice for it was quite small – the opening little more than a chevron-shaped slit in the ground, but judging from the its apparent depth as suggested by the imprenetable darkness below, it seemed to be exactly what he had been looking for all day. The boy checked the surroundings to confirm the ground around was solid, noting how the opening was well hidden from any passers-by because it was directly behind a large piece of slanting, eroded gray slab of reinforced concrete jutting from the sand and only accessible if one pushed himself between it and the crooked mess of H-shaped, rusty iron girders that stood rigid towards the sky like they had intentionally piled into the ground for support. To him they had a semblance of bony fingers of an uplifted palm; a hand that lay against the slab of concrete as if in an effort to hide the crack below.

The boy glanced behind him, where a veritable forest of similar, twisted and heavily corroded iron beams and bits of concrete protruded here and there from the red sand in an eerily uniform maze, but saw no-one nearby. Again he stared into the deep black void. It had likely just recently appeared, caved in and hopefullu turned into a passage leading deeper into the ground between the girders. Or perhaps it had been missed by scavengers until now simply because it was an awkward spot to reach for an adult, which made it well worth a closer look. He lifted his home-made gloves – thick protective layers composed of leather straps and various bits of scarred plastic – beside his dirt-streaked cheeks behind the visor that refused to stay up no matter how often he pushed it up, and cried out, without averting his eyes from the find, as if suddenly afraid it might vanish into the sand unless he kept an eye trained at it:

”Guys! Here, I found something! Come on!”

[Tig]

Nice beginning. It makes me want to read more!
It reminds me a little of an Arthur C. Clarke short I read just last month.

An editor might want you to limit the length of some of the longer sentences, but otherwise, it looks like a Go from what I've read.

[Spudman]

Good start, but if the whole story is that filled with adjectives then I would have a hard time reading it. You might consider making much of the rest of the story a little simpler to read and pepper it occasionally with your very colorful and precise descriptions only once in a while.

I find that when the author isn't really precise it allows me to use more of my imagination. That said...I want to know more of your story. The intro really hooked me.:hungry

[deeaa]

Yes, the style becomes much less descriptive later on, and usually based on dialog as well. I've rewritten the intro many times already, and I've purposefully made it more...well descriptive than the rest I suppose. It's about the only thing the publishers read along with the synopsis, so I'm trying to make it 'literary' enough and interesting. I've scanned thru and read many beginnings of books in the genre, and they all seem to have impossibly wordy sentences half a page long especially in the beginning. That, and they tend to be like 400 pages long these days without exception, and mine is just maybe 250 or something.

Here's a short excerpt of it from much later on...the style is somewhat different:


Bull frowned. “That still seems ****ed up to me. All I understand is I must seem such a dummy to you”
Sevens smiled condescendly.

”I’m afraid that you are quite correct in a way…I have to consciously slow down my thinking just to be able to converse with you, or I simply cannot do it. You do seem very slow to me. Slow as people down below with only basic neural enhancements. It is not easy to understand, I know. But do remember it also makes you quite unique to us all. It makes you priceless, a thing of marvel. Indispensable, even. Remember that. Even though it is also regrettable in that your genetic predisposition suggests you would have been an excellent subject for augmentations…” his voice trailed off as if he was falling into deep thought. Or perhaps he simply let his superior brain get up to speed again, Bull thought bitterly.

“I’m tired” Bull suddenly found himself saying, staring at the man intently. Sevens snapped out with a visible twitch of muscles as if waking from a dream, looked at him strangely, then out of the window and kept quiet a while still before he spoke.

“Well there is one thing your un-augmented brain requires plenty of. Sleep. When you sleep, your brain keeps busy still, arranging everything you have gathered during the day so that you could access the information better later on...sort of nature’s own version of what we have achieved” he smiled. “We shall see…tomorrow. No rush. Too much information is not good for your, eh…constricted brain. You will feel much better when you have had some sleep” he shook his head almost like with condolence. Then he bowed slightly to Bull and made to leave the room.

“Sevens…do me a favor?”

“What is it 2951?”

“That, actually…since I’m so special as you say…could you call me by my real name? 2951 is not a name I recognize and you also full well know it belonged to someone else now dead.” Sevens looked surprised.

“Well, certainly. What is it?”

“Joor Bull. But, simply Bull will do” Bull said, and the simple act of pronouncing his own name after such a long time almost made him choke with emotion. Sevens shrugged.

“Bull. Very well. While in the facility, I see why not. Oh I almost forgot…I have sent for a Vid for you…fully at your disposal. Feel free to indulge in whatever you wish, twen…Bull” he smiled apologetically as he made his exit.

That night Bull lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling, not even wanting to turn on his new Vid. What Sevens had told him put everything in perspective, and he felt a great sense of calm settling on him. Everything was making sense now. Maybe he did have a reason to live after all. He had even had his own name back. He slipped on his ear buds and selected a lengthy piece that had sounded like the wind blowing in the wastes, and he fell asleep staring out of the window at the towering wall of glass of the next building, much as he had once stared at the lights of the city from afar, beyond the crush zone. It was many lifetimes ago. As he fell asleep he thought he heard voices whispering in his ears and he hoped he would not see nightmares of aliens that night. The last thought that went through his mind before he slipped into dreams was I wonder if the tapped ever dream? and somehow, perhaps due to his ‘human intuition’ he also knew the answer: they do not.

[Tig]

Ah, I like the "feel" of this! Very nice. I could read a book like this.

[deeaa]

Thanks!

In brief, it's a dystopian vision set in a world which has been decimated by nuclear war, and in which only one city stands, outside which some survivors as well. The city is run by aliens who seem to be the architects of the war in the first place, and surrounded by a ring of people living as their servants, or at any rate separated and locked in a quite a dark and joyless existence, and who are more or less augmented with genetic and mechanical additions. These augmentations and brain functions and theories on them are a pretty important part of the story.

The protagonist starts out as boy in the wastes but is smuggled into the city where he's later snatched by a secret underground organization preparing to attack the alien city and it's robotic guardians, and take over, and since he has no implants etc. proves to be the key to this as he can infitrate the city, and he's trained to be an assassin and such. In the process he's trapped in a brainwashing game and threatened and coaxed to do various things, but he also grows in every way and ends up having to make moral decisions that culminate in the fate of both aliens and humans, and finds out more about the society than he would have wanted, and about himself and humanity, beliefs and such, and the meaning of life no less.