Want my advice? (It’s worth *every* penny you pay for it. Okay — it’s free, but I have managed to get four books published, without an agent.)
Submit it to Baen Books. You can find guidelines for submitting manuscripts at: http://www.baen.com/FAQS.htm
Baen is new-author friendly. Does not mean they will accept your manuscript. Does not even mean they will reply. But John Ringo (who is a Freeper) got first published by them and is now on their “A” list.
My bet is that if your manuscript *really* is as devastating as you think it is that Baen will pick it up.
But you have to be good. Very good — in the top 3%. I am a pretty good writer, better than 9 out of 10, (around 89th percentile, I would guess). That puts me in the publishing equivalent of the Triple-A minors, but I am not good enough for the majors.
Good point with Baen. They’re on my radar, for sure. Jim’s in good hands now.
I’ll definitely consider submitting to Baen in the future. Since I’m only on my third query, I want to see what kind of agent feedback I can get first. Half of the time agents just send form rejections, but my first two were personal. The second agent actually read some of the material and provided some comments - none of which were really negative. Woot!