: Re: Quality examples of 'in medias res' starting sequences in SF literature You can find my initial trials here, and, based on feedback, version two here. I was trying to create a sort of 'flashforward'

@Angie602

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From TV Tropes ("In Media Res" and "How We Got Here"):

Fight Club starts with Tyler Durden holding a gun in the Narrator's mouth, then goes back to the beginning and catches back up.
Kill Bill Volume One opens with The Bride killing victim number two before jumping back to explain how she got to that point, the film ends with the killing of victim number one.
Each book of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga opens with a preface that is actually describing a scene that happens near the climax of the story.
The Red Mars trilogy opens the night of the assassination of John Boone, the first man on Mars, then jumps back about twenty-seven years.
Christopher Nolan's films seem to specialize in this. Batman Begins start the story proper with Bruce Wayne in a Tibetan prison before flashbacking to explain how he got there. The Prestige begins with a shot of a pile of top hats scattered in some woods followed by Michael Caine performing a magic trick to a little girl, both of which only pop up in the last third of the film. Inception begins with Cobb washing up on a beach before being dragged to meet an elderly man. The film spends most of its running time recounting how Cobb ended up there.

However, as I've mentioned in the comments, this is a problematic technique. It's meant to offset the slow build-up to conflict, but in practice, it often merely delays that slow build-up. The reader reaches the slow bit a couple of pages later, but unless the flash-forward is extremely powerful and its significance to the story is (and remains) immediately obvious, the flashforward scene seems unrelated and is soon forgotten.

To all that, add the difficulty of presenting a compelling scene before introducing the setting and characters (TV Tropes calls this "Lost In Media Res", and for good cause). This is a difficulty I certainly think the critique pieces you posted suffered from.

One example I'd consider successful is the opening of Dan Simmon's Endymion - the first four pages, available in this preview. For the most part, it's less of a scene and more of a monologue - but this allows the author to toss in some teaser-ish details, particularly the idea of "making love to a messiah," and the twin death sentences. No less importantly, this lets him explicitly introduce the tone and feel of the story. It's so explicit it's almost clumsy, but he keeps it short, and peppers it with powerful, immediate details to look forward to. The Schroedinger's cat box is at once both very easy to grasp even when knowing nothing of the world, and also extremely significant (it's the narrator's death penalty; it's also bizarre and ingenious, making us wonder why on earth - and in the setting - this contraption has come to be used). It should be noted the narrator returns to this flash-forward repeatedly throughout the books, so we never forget about it.

Hope this helps :)

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