When you’re pitching a speculative fiction story to an agent or publisher, do their eyes sometimes roll back in their heads, and you hear them murmur, “What exactly does that mean?” The term “speculative fiction” says very little about the actual story. And if you try to narrow it to “fantasy” or “sci-fi,” that’s still not very descriptive. An agent or publisher may favor other genres, such as thriller, mystery, or noir. To hone your pitch, it helps to nail your understanding of sub-genres.
Blade Runner by Ridley Scott
For example, was the movie Blade Runner just sci-fi (because it contains futuristic androids, flying cars, and mentions “off-world”)? If you were director Ridley Scott, pitching a studio, could you tack on other sub-genres? The movie has an explicit “ticking clock”—the four-year lifespan of the Nexus-6 replicants that drives their desperate actions to extend their lives. The clock device is usually found in thrillers.
So, you could say it’s a sci-fi thriller. But there’s also a puzzle to be solved. Rick Deckard, a retired blade runner forced back into action, investigates and hunts down rogue replicants. This pursuit forms the central investigative element of the story, with unfolding clues, like a mystery. Then, of course, there is the dark, moody atmosphere, flawed anti-hero, and femme fatale usually found in noir stories.
Pitching as A Sub-Genre
If the studio isn’t keen on sci-fi, you could pitch Blade Runner as a mystery-thriller-noir story set in the future. We can apply the same thinking to a novel, broadening the way we explain it to agents and publishers who have their “sweet spots.”
There’s a downside. If you don’t understand the conventions of the sub-genres, you could look stupid. You have to know when to call a story a thriller, mystery, noir, or something else. With that in mind, I’ve researched sub-genres and developed “calculators” to tell whether your story is a match. I assembled this information for panels at an upcoming Killer Nashville International Writers Conference in August 2025.
Look Smart
My Mystery-Thriller and Noir slides outline the genre histories, describe salient features, prominent authors, and provide a checklist for evaluating two sample speculative fiction novels (my own). Use these to look smart the next time you meet an agent or publisher.
published his first novel, The Perfection of Fish, in 2020. His manuscript for The Pieces of My Self won the 2023 Claymore Award for Best Sci-fi/Fantasy. The Digital Dreams of Henri Knightly is a work in progress, long-listed for the Yeovil International Literary Prize. He belongs to an astrophysics society and lives near