How Many Clocks are in Your Manuscript?

A Fifty Queries Club Post

Hello friends!

Two Thursdays in a row with a Fifty Queries Club post!!???! I told you I’d turned over a new leaf. And welcome new subscribers! You might have seen the Substack shoutout yesterday, and if so—welcome! There’s lots in the archive to discover. You can even search, with the little magnifying glass there at the top of the archive page. And ICYMI, the Fifty Queries Club is a paid subscriber-only query critique open to those who’ve queried at least 50 agents. Let’s do another one today!

K is writing a 109k word adult science fiction novel called HYBRID. It takes place in a world where aliens and humans co-exist (sorta), and where aliens are treated like second class citizen, to put it nicely. The story’s main character is half-human, half-alien, and has lived in the segregated zone for a long time/forever/her whole life. (I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of the query.) She wants a new job, other than the one most aliens are basically forced to take, and maybe this time, she’ll get it.

That’s the set up of the story. K’s first five pages do well to establish the dynamics of the world: space travel, AI, other advanced, tech, etc. This is all good. This is all what is supposed to happen in the beginning of a SF novel. Her pages are interesting and well written. But what I am missing, in the query and the first five pages (but more on the pages part in a second) is a sense of urgency.