Querying for a setting-heavy speculative fiction novel
I'm an attentive follower of Janet Reid's Query Shark, and I've learned a lot. But Reid doesn't represent speculative fiction, which seems to present wrinkles of its own.
Particularly, Query Shark often stresses the importance of quickly introducing the main characters, and describing what happens in the book, what the conflict is, what choices the protagonist needs to make.
But in an SF/F book, if the speculative premise is complex and at the heart of the novel, this seems difficult to do without at least some explanation of the premise. The book itself, if it's good, will explain the premise gradually and with a lot of showing-not-telling. But the query seems like it might get bogged down if the premise and the worldbuilding aren't reducible to a clear one-line tag.
Here are some examples of SF/F novels I would have trouble constructing a query for:
- Hyperion, by Dan Simmons: The setting is a mish-mash of genre tropes and original mythology; they all intertwine eventually, but I'd be at a loss to try to briefly introduce the setting as a whole.
- The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, and The City and the City, by China Mieville: These books are, largely, explorations of their central premise. They're hardly without plot or character, but understanding these is contingent on continuous new understandings about the speculative premise.
Are SF/F agents more open to infodump-ish introductions? Or is there a better way to construct a query for a book whose characters and plot rely on a complex speculative premise?
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