IO9 has compiled a list of great opening lines from science fiction, supported with some reasons as to why they selected them. The above quote comes from one of my all-time favourite authors, Ken MacLeod (from the Stone Canal) and I can see why they chose it; its one of those opening lines that grabs the reader right away and you have to know what the hell is going on (incidentally Ken’s new book, Night Sessions, set in a world after the ‘Faith Wars’, will be out very soon and looks typically thought-provoking – its next on my novel list).
Charlie Stross’ latest book (just out in the UK from Orbit), Saturn’s Children, also features with “Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it.” The narrator is a human-like robot, designed to be a love slave for real humans, although sadly for her (because she is programmed to want to be a love slave) humanity (her One True Love) is now extinct. Charlie pays homage to some of the sci-fi greats here – notably Asimov, of course, but also Heinlein and others with a very clever book which manages to incorporate some speculation about the nature of free will, class and liberty alongside a conspiracy thriller, with plenty of sex and humour thrown in along the way.
And I am totally with IO9 on their choice of Bill Gibson’s opening to Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Its pure cyberpunk but at the same time reminiscent of the sort of descriptive lines from hard boiled noirs from fifty years before; makes me think on a fusion of Raymond Chandler and David Cronenberg, circa Videodrome. Anyone have their own favourite opening lines from SF&F novels (or graphic novels, for that matter) they’d like to add?(link via Boing Boing)
July 25th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
“He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead” – of course it isn’t really the first line – which from memory might be “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in some homage to Dickens – but it is the introduction of one of the greatest characters in all SF. Gully Foyle and Tiger, Tiger – you can’t do much better.