The Sword and Laser discussion

Trike wrote: "Are you claiming Schulz wrote that line? Because he didn't. It was written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, at least 120 years before Peanuts was created."

Schulz wrote the Peanuts stip, I meant. (Can't believe I misspelled his name, again!)

Here's the actual line from Paul Clifford.

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Of course, everyone has their critics!

Also that is the 1st from A Wrinkle in Time.

Mine is a little long.
It is the first paragraph of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett :

"Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap…
And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly."

I was contemplating having a "Great Opening Prologue" thread as well, because I went back to Robert L. Forward's superb Dragon's Egg to see what its opening line was and ended up reading the entire prologue all over again. It is so good.

"I was lying on the floor watching TV and exercising what was left of my legs when the newscaster's jaw collapsed."

-- the short story Soft by F. Paul Wilson

A Song for Arbonne

A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay:

"On a morning in the springtime of the year, when the snows of the mountains were melting and the rivers swift in their running, Aelis De Miraval watched her husband ride out at dawn to hunt in the forest west of their castle, and shortly after that she took horse herself, traveling north and east along the shores of the lake towards the begetting of her son."

It took me a while to get past "It was night again" (The Name of the Wind) mostly because I couldn't get Laurel and Hardy out of my head:

The Night was dark
They usually are

Aildiin wrote: "Mine is a little long.
It is the first paragraph of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett..."

Small Gods is a serious contender for the best thing Terry Pratchett has ever written, in my opinion. I chickened out of starting a thread about it in the Discworld section because I'm a little afraid of the religious discussion it would probably spark.

Tor has great first lines from 5 YA books. They're all really good.

Yay, thread revival time!

Dharmakirti wrote: "Rich wrote: ""A screaming comes across the sky.""

One of these days, I will make it past the first sentence of Gravity's Rainbow...or so I keep telling myself."

OK, these comments were from 2013, but I also love that opening line. So short and concise. In stark contrast to the great opening line in another book by Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49:

"One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

Tobias wrote: "Yay, thread revival time!

Dharmakirti wrote: "Rich wrote: ""A screaming comes across the sky.""

One of these days, I will make it past the first sentence of Gravity's Rainbow...or so I..."

The Crying of Lot 49 was the first Pynchon novel I read and that opening sentence, with the names Oedipa Maas and Pierce Inverartity, hooked me.

Trike wrote: "Tor has great first lines from 5 YA books. They're all really good."

Mortal Engines and its three sequels by Philip Reeve are some of my favorite books.

I really like the first line from Wool. The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.

Ronald wrote: "I really like the first line from Wool. The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do."

It's too bad that Shift and Dust weren't as good as WOOL. That was a really great book that completely dropped the ball with the sequels.

Wilmar wrote: "Ronald wrote: "I really like the first line from Wool. The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do."

It's t..."
Agreed. Shift in particular was really slow getting going and predictable.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival like a beast in a trap. He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity."
- The Stars My Destination (the second opening lines, at the beginning of the first chapter - the opening lines from the prologue have been quoted above).

"Meyrueis, Lozere, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me."
- The Rider.

"...Suffering is one very long moment."
- De Profundis.

"He did not wear his scarlet coat,
for blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
when they found him with the dead:
The poor dead woman whom he loved
and murdered in her bed."
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

"White founts falling in the courts of the sun
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England in looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun;
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard..."
- Lepanto.

Just encountered this line from Tinker by Wen Spencer:

"The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage's tall chain link fence shortly after the hyperphase gate powered down."

So much world-building built into that sentence. Wargs, elves, urban fantasy, science fiction, action... talk about an enticing gumbo!

IMO, that kind of just overdoes it. Like starting a movie off with a massive multi-colored explosion. The snob in me wonders, "but what about the plot? The characters? The cinematography?"

It seems.... a distraction.

Kenneth wrote: "IMO, that kind of just overdoes it. Like starting a movie off with a massive multi-colored explosion. The snob in me wonders, "but what about the plot? The characters? The cinematography?"

It see..."

It makes me sad that your inner child has lost his joie de vivre, Kenneth.

Oh by no means. But my inner child can smell bad writing, because long ago in another galaxy I had to peer edit stories in writing class that looked like that line. The problem? 14 year old boys decided that the best possible story would result from picking up all of their favorite things and tossing them in the blender. This isn't exactly a falsehood, but they went for the metaphorical 'crush' button instead of 'liquify'. You end up with a chunky mess of dissociated components instead of a fluid silky texture. Alright, end of analogy. My story back then was just as terrible, but I'd never write that way now.

What I'm saying is that just name dropping a bunch of stuff in one sentence like that, especially stuff that has pre-established culture mythos attached to it, is generally not good writing. And it doesn't really invite the reader to pay close attention. After all, at any moment the dinosaurs will show up, but laser Hitler will defeat them with his keytar. I think I've seen this short movie on Netflix, actually. Entertaining though it may have been, it lacked all substance and could never support a longer format.

Tinker is actually much better written than you assume. The sentence pretty much says "we've got elves and wargs, we've got Pittsburgh, we've got a junkyard, we've got some weird hyperdimensional thing." It's promptly explained, and it touches on most of the needed worldbuilding concepts for the series. (Read it years ago, just looked at Inside Book at Amazon to see where she takes it.)

"I may have already had some presentiment of my future."

and,

"Having cast one manuscript into the seas of time, I now begin again."

These two are some of my favorites

Not a SciFi or Fantasy one but Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess starts with "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
It quickly becomes clear that it is a deliberate attempt by both the author and his writer protagonist, to write an arresting opening line

"Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me" - Kushiel's Dart

Love this book and it's many great quotes:

"That which yields is not always weak"

“If I'm to be damned for what I've done, I'll be damned in full and not by halves.”

“It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.”

"Mrs. Anderson was dead."

I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells

Trike wrote: "After watching the S&L interview with Trudi Canavan I looked up her first book, The Magicians' Guild. I'll have to read these simply because of the awesomeness of the first line: "It i..."

My parents discovered and loved this series a couple months ago, so I read it so I could discuss it with them. When I opened the first page, I remembered this thread.

"It was a pleasure to burn."

And ever since watching the movie as a kid, I have also been impressed by the first lines of David Copperfield:

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

I ran across this one today.

From Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel by Matt Carter.

"Like anyone who ever attended a public high school, I first considered becoming a supervillain during a mandatory assembly on the dangers of peer pressure."

Heh.

Encountered a couple other good ones today.

From The Rook :

"Dear You,
The body you are wearing used to be mine."

Hmm, intriguing.

From The Summer Dragon :

"They were feeding the babies when the slaughter began."

This might be grimdark.

New finds and/or rememories:

"Sometimes Lady Luck's idea of girlish decorum is to pull on a pair of jackboots and frog march you towards the jaws of destiny." - Revolution World

"Let's start with the end of the world, shall we?" - The Fifth Season

"Turns out that when you kill a god, people want to talk to you.” - Hounded

"How strange, that such an insignificant little world should come to matter so much." - The Uplift War

""I once played Romeo and Juliet as a one-man show," I said." - The Golden Globe

"Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley." - Uprooted

Cheezburger did a thing today "31 Award-Winningly Bad First Lines to Novels" and I immediately thought of this thread. Many don't say what book it's from but some of them are:

"Queen Aquareine had a stern look upon her beautiful face. Cap'n Bill guessed from this look that the mermaid was angry." (from The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum)

"General Clap did not understand the way of the ancient warrior. However, the Shadow Wolves did." (from The Way Of The Shadow Wolves by STEVEN SEAGAL!?!?! and Tom Morrissey)

"I dance with English, and our tale is only just beginning." (from Gods Of The Word: Archetypes In The Consonants by Margaret Magnus)

"Joe just looks at me with that stupid look, covered in flowing blood, going onto his shirt like ketchup randomness, so much messier and more random than I could ever plan." (from Palo Alto by James Franco)

terpkristin wrote: "Cheezburger did a thing today "31 Award-Winningly Bad First Lines to Novels" and I immediately thought of this thread. Many don't say what book it's from but some of them are:"

Many actors should not write. See also: Sean Penn.

Although apparently Krysten Ritter’s book, Bonfire, is pretty good. She might be the exception to the rule.

Another Scalzi one this one from The End of All Things "the muntineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for the collapse of the Flow."

“I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites.” All Systems Red

“So... you’ll cut my head off.” - We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

“My left eye doesn’t lie.” - Waypoint Kangaroo

“Lovelace had been in a body for twenty-eight minutes, and it still felt every bit as wrong as it had the second she woke up inside it.” - A Closed and Common Orbit

Charles wrote: "Another Scalzi one this one from The End of All Things "the muntineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for the collapse of the Flow.""

I think you mean The Collapsing Empire.

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.” - Red Sister

Trike wrote: "“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.” - Red Sister"

Yeah, I forgot to share that one, it's right up there with the Gunslinger for me.

Blood Rites in The Dresden Files series.

"The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault."

and from Summer Knight in the same series

"It rained toads the day the White Council came to town."

Apollo's Crow wrote: ""Ash fell from the sky."

Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn

I just love this opening line. It evokes such mystery and dread and curiosity, with five simple words."


Five years late, I come to applaud.

The entire first paragraph is great. I love the sentence "With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” — Feed

“Some people are skilled, and some are lucky, but at that moment Mince realized he was neither.” — Heir of Novron

“My name is Nate Twitchell, but I can’t help that.” — The Enormous Egg

“There was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time and place.” — Odd and the Frost Giants

“All this happened, more or less.” — Slaughterhouse-Five

“Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party.” - Walkaway

I have to agree with Stubble about Blood Rites.

"The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault." is my favorite opening line ever.

Major spoilers for Tiamat's Wrath - that first line is a gut punch:

(view spoiler)["Chrisjen Avasarala was dead." (hide spoiler)]

Dara wrote: "Major spoilers for Tiamat's Wrath - that first line is a gut punch:

[spoilers removed]"

Now does my status make sense?

Trike wrote: "“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.” - Red Sister"

Hooray :D

Rob wrote: "Dara wrote: "Major spoilers for Tiamat's Wrath - that first line is a gut punch:

[spoilers removed]"

Now does my status make sense?"

Nope still confused.

Dara wrote: "Rob wrote: "Dara wrote: "Major spoilers for Tiamat's Wrath - that first line is a gut punch:

[spoilers removed]"

Now does my status make sense?"

Nope still confused."

I'm not sure if you're joking, or not. Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else posting on my Tiamets status post when I first started it...

Rob wrote: "I'm not sure if you're joking, or not. Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else posting on my Tiamets status post when I first started it..."

I was me. I was joking with ya. :-)

Dara wrote: "Rob wrote: "I'm not sure if you're joking, or not. Maybe I'm confusing you with someone else posting on my Tiamets status post when I first started it..."

I was me. I was joking with ya. :-)"

Ah, OK. It's been a day..

"I was staring out the classroom window and daydreaming about adventure when I spotted the flying saucer."
Armada by Ernest Cline.
This line sets up the whole novel; the protagonist, what he wants, and the inciting incident.