Jack Mozley is a science fiction specialist at Perez Literary & Entertainment who pursues high-concept, literary SF with genuine intellectual ambition — the kind that uses the extraordinary to interrogate the everyday.
In brief
Mozley's wishlist is one of the most specific and philosophically grounded SF-only mandates in the current agenting landscape — every touchstone they name is canonical, award-winning SF, signaling a reader with deep genre literacy rather than a generalist dipping into the category.
Every stated interest sits within the SF spectrum: speculative literary fiction, social-commentary SF, dystopia/utopia, apocalypse/singularity scenarios, AI and non-human consciousness, first contact, and multiverse/alternate history with intellectual heft. There is no mystery, thriller, romance, or fantasy crossover appetite visible here.
Mozley's personal origin story — the child of a mining engineer and a poet, holder of a doctorate in quantum physics — is not window dressing. It predicts exactly the kind of manuscript that will land: rigorous in its speculative logic, but alive on the sentence level.
They explicitly invite submissions from writers from underrepresented backgrounds, framing SF's subversive, perspective-disrupting capacity as central to their editorial mission — this is a values statement, not a box-ticking note.
As of May 2025 the submission form is closed; writers should monitor for a reopening before querying.
Lately
Mozley describes their entry point to the genre as short, formally inventive SF vignettes — particularly those that use a single sharp speculative twist to reframe human experience entirely. This shapes what they're looking for: impact that is concentrated, purposeful, and leaves the reader unable to return to their prior assumptions.
What Jack is looking for
Mozley's core passion: SF that is formally and intellectually ambitious, not genre comfort food. They want work that leaves the reader genuinely altered — the visceral, destabilizing impact they first encountered in short-form SF comics and later in literary genre novels. Think high-concept premises executed with the care and prose quality of mainstream literary fiction. Weird, troubling, Palahniuk-adjacent in its willingness to disturb.
SF as a scalpel for examining social organisation, cultural prejudice, and the arbitrary structures humans build and enforce. Mozley is drawn to work that continues the tradition Le Guin established — fiction that uses alien or future societies as a mirror for the absurdities of our own.
Mozley wants moral and political complexity here, not simple cautionary tales. The best submissions will hold multiple possibilities in tension — neither pure hope nor unrelenting despair, though they're comfortable with the latter if executed with conviction.
Visions that push genuinely beyond conventional end-of-world scenarios — pandemic, collapse, or transcendence conceived in ways that surprise even seasoned SF readers. Mozley wants the emotional weight and inevitability of the best apocalyptic fiction combined with concepts that feel truly horizon-expanding.
Mozley is hungry for work that genuinely grapples with superintelligent AI and with the phenomenology of non-human minds — what it is actually like to be a radically different kind of intelligence. The bar is high: they want rigorous, imaginative attempts, not shorthand. Banksian AI with personality and arrogance, or incomprehensible alien minds in the Neuromancer vein, are both welcome.
Mozley wants the unthinkable genuinely attempted — alien life conceived with enough strangeness to be truly disorienting, not a human in a rubber suit. The best submissions will make first contact feel like a waking dream or a paradigm collapse.
Mozley is comfortable across the full scale of SF storytelling — from galaxy-spanning epics with sweeping historical arcs to intimate, character-focused narratives. They do not privilege one scale over the other; what matters is that the chosen scope is fully inhabited.
Alternate history and multiverse SF are welcome when they bring genuine intellectual energy rather than nostalgia or surface-level 'what if' premises. Steampunk is not ruled out, but only if it arrives with the ideological depth and satirical bite of the best graphic-novel-inflected alternate fiction rather than as an aesthetic exercise.
Not the right fit
On Jack's list
Taste fingerprint
How to query Jack
The form is closed as of May 2025 — check for a reopening before doing anything else.
Mozley's touchstone list is unusually specific and canonical; read as many of the named titles as possible before writing your query letter. Demonstrating genuine familiarity with why those books matter will signal you're writing for the right reader.
Lead with the conceptual core of your novel — what speculative premise or intellectual question drives it — before summarising plot. Mozley thinks in ideas first.
If your work has a social or political argument embedded in its speculative framework, name it plainly. Mozley is not put off by SF that has a thesis.
Writers from underrepresented backgrounds are explicitly invited to submit — Mozley ties this directly to their editorial values, not as a footnote.
Avoid pitching work that is primarily action-driven, world-building-first, or atmosphere-led without a strong ideational core. The comps Mozley names are all, without exception, idea-first novels.
If your book sits in the steampunk or alternate-history space, make the intellectual and satirical dimension of your premise unmistakably clear in the query — Mozley's interest here is conditional on genuine depth, not aesthetic.
Keep the query focused: Mozley's wishlist suggests a reader who values precision and economy. A sprawling, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink pitch will likely undercut the work.