Are you a literary agent?

On the off chance that by some miraculous quirk of timing and fate, the person reading this is a literary agent that specializes in science fiction, I wanted to let you know that I should be contacting you in the near future on bent knee, begging for a moment of your time and consideration of me as your next author and client.

I say 'should' rather than 'will', because to be honest, I am still pretty overwhelmed by the process of separating the good from the bad in your industry. Trying to find an actual literary agent in a seemingly infinite universe of opportunistic blood sucking pathogens that call themselves literary agents, is a pretty challenging task.

I wish there was an easy method an aspiring-to-be-published author like myself could use to litmus-test my way past the predatory hucksters that seem to have infected your industry to a point at which there may be no hope for recovery.

At first, I thought maybe the agents that distance themselves thoroughly from authors, either by means of setting the bar inordinately high for contact to be made, or by simply ignoring any and all attempts to contact them, I thought they may be the actual real agents... but now I am not sure. Definitely the agents that want to talk with me aren't the ones I need to talk with, I get that... but does this industry need to be so adversarial, so utterly contemptuous to the authors that make the entire publishing industry function?

Surely, there can be a middle ground we can all meet on, somewhere between the greedy hordes of opportunistic budget-sucking parasites that clamor for my attention, and the lofty, unassailable fortress of the upper crust-de-la-crust of publishing society that won't return a call unless it's engraved in platinum foil and delivered by carrier pigeon on Wednesday evenings between 6:53 and 6:57 pm (all other queries will be ignored).

Surely, among you, there is one. One person with a fervent desire to find the Next Big Thing™, with the connections and experience to do something about it. Surely... there is one.

Is that person you?