Writing popular fiction

this requirement can be met.
    This, from my own novel,
Anti-Man
:
It was really too much to hope for, but we seemed to have lost them. We had jumped from Knoxville to Pierre, South Dakota, from that drab terminal to Bismark, North Dakota, and on to San Francisco. In the City of the Sun, we had walked unknown with our hands in our pockets and our faces open to the sky, feeling less like fugitives than we had any right to, grabbing a day of much needed rest and a moment to collect our thoughts before dashing on. We had spent the day buying gear for the last leg of our escape, eating our first decent meal in two days, and sitting through some atrocious toto-experience film just because it was dark in the theater and, therefore, safer for the two most wanted men in the world. At midnight, we had bought tickets and boarded the next Pole-crossing rocket flight that would take us over Alaska. As the high-altitude craft flashed above Northern California and into Oregon, I took Him into the bathroom at the end of the First Class compartment (fugitives should always travel First Class, for the rich are always too concerned with the way they look to notice anyone else) and locked the door. "Take off your coat and shirt," I told Him. "I want to see that wound."
    Here, the narrative hook is planted in the first sentence, when the reader discovers the narrator and his companion are on the run from someone. The second sentence elaborates that point. The third sentence labels them as "fugitives" which would seem to put them on the wrong side of the law. In the fourth sentence, the reader is thoroughly hooked when he's told that they are the two most wanted men in the world. What are they wanted for? Will they escape their pursuers, or be caught? How badly is the unnamed man wounded? How was he wounded? What complications does his wound pose to their flight? The reader must follow the story to its conclusion to learn some of these answers.
    A wealth of background detail is fitted into that paragraph, preparing the reader for a science fiction setting. That the heroes "jumped" from city to city implies some futuristic transportation system. "Toto-experience film" is a term that implies omni-sensory cinematic experience but which describes nothing available in the present-day world. They travel in a world-spanning rocketship, and such means of travel appears so commonplace that a future setting is indicated. Finally, the use of the capitalized "Him" for the narrator's companion prepares the reader to expect something odd, something presently indefinable. This last, besides being background, functions as a narrative hook too.
    Also from my own work,
Dark of the
Woods:
The first bit of trouble came even as they were leaving the starship on Demos's port field; it was a harbinger of worse times ahead.
    The first sentence is also the first paragraph. The narrative hook is the "trouble" mentioned and the statement that it was indicative of all that is to follow. Also in the first sentence, a starship and alien planet are mentioned, immediately clarifying at least the generalities of background for the reader.
    In a science fiction novel, as in no other category, you can delay the appearance of the narrative hook for a few paragraphs,
if
the exotic background is so strange and
intriguing of itself that it acts as the initial grabber to keep the reader going until the problem arises. Such a delay in the plot should never be longer than a page or two.
    As example, consider the first paragraph of Robert Heinlein's
Podkayne of Mars
:
All my life I've wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.
    Though the heroine lacks a desperate problem at the outset, she does interest us by casually discounting Earth. Why is Earth a backwater place? Why is it unfit for habitation? What has happened between our time and hers? By the time that she explains herself, we have also been narratively hooked.
    Robert Silverberg's excellent novel,
Thorns
, has a similar beginning in which background acts as a narrative grabber:
"Pain is instructive," Duncan Chalk wheezed. On crystal rungs he ascended the east wall of his office. Far on high was the burnished desk, the inlaid communicator box from which he controlled his empire. It would have been nothing for Chalk to sail up the wall on the staff of a gravitron. Yet each morning he imposed