Title: Catalog 922 Genre: Science Fiction Word Count:521 Type of Feedback: Hi, everyone. New here and currently writing a science fiction novel. First draft is finished, and I'm now in the editing process. I'm struggling with organization as I keep switching the order of the first couple chapters around. Which of the following two openings is most captivating? Will post the first couple paragraphs of each chapter. Also would love your general impressions or more specific critiques. Thanks for your help!
Opening #1
Harrison Franc is feeling understimulated. The meeting will last another hour at least, and the thought suddenly strikes him that he’s never engaged in nexus with Bett before. She’s seated across from him, pretending to be interested in the current presentation on binning procedure adjustments. Her arms, tightly crossed against her chest, relax and unfold when she notices Harrison watching her. Her posture promptly adjusts as she sits up straight and pulls her shoulders back slightly, accentuating the graceful line of her neck. That’s a positive signal, Harrison thinks. Erotic, even. Harrison knows how to read people, or at least that’s what he claims and believes. As warehouse manager and favorite nephew of company owner Dunn W. Franc, rejection isn’t something he comes across often.
He activates the nexus scroll, which he always keeps running in the background for moments such as these, and is pleased to find she’s running it too. Nearly everyone in the room is running it in fact. There’s something a bit incestuous about the ranks of middle and upper management at the company. Nearly everyone’s pretending to screw each other, but nearly no one actually is.
Harrison surveys the room. He’s fairly certain he’s been with all the women at the table except for Bett. He can’t recall why. The management trainee is pretty in her way, although her teeth are a bit too large and a bit too white. Most employees take advantage of the company discount and make cosmetic adjustments as needed, but there are those who go overboard. Bett’s done too much with her smile, he decides. The newer hires don’t know how to pace themselves. She looks too—joyful. It’s disingenuous. And highly uninteresting.
Opening #2
On this Monday morning, like most all Monday mornings, Darla arrives at her workstation, sips her coffee and looks out through the atmo-glass; there, on the glacial horizon, rests the immense, pale gold face of Saturn, which swallows more than a third of the perpetually black Enceladus sky. She works in the contact center but can clearly hear the attached warehouse and its familiar rhythm—the mechanized packing, sorting and shipping that never cease—not for one second of any minute of any day.
It’s exactly 5:59 am and time to engage. She sets her coffee aside, removes the catalog scroll from her drawer and slips it into the port at the nape of her neck. The object, oblong and an inch in length, quietly slips into her flesh. There is no cold, hard click as the thing attaches. The connection, after all, is organic in nature. There is instead the soft, wet sound of a foreign object nestling into warm matter—supple flesh, hungry and alive. Next, she turns on her third eye, which can be switched on and off as needed, but must never, and can never, be removed.
There are a number of controls on either armrest of Darla’s chair, although she mostly utilizes only three: green to dial in, yellow to hold and red to log out. At exactly six am, she selects the green button. Immediately, there’s a beep and her first customer of the day.