Before a title, before the characters, before anything else, I know my first line.
Since my first attempts as a writer, I couldn’t embark on a new project without knowing that first line—as if a simple sentence was the embryo for everything that was to follow. In The School for Good and Evil, for instance, those opening words: “Sophie had waited her whole life to be kidnapped” became my guiding light through the Endless Woods of dark fairy tale fantasy. Indeed, that first line became the series’ entire DNA template; when in doubt, I’d ritually look back at it to see not just a ‘beginning,’ but tone, theme, character, inspiration.
To writers new and old, then, I offer this list as a gentle encouragement to keep our ambitions low and our boldness high. After all, embarking on a quest to write the perfect novel is a fool’s fantasy. But a perfect first line is within all of our reach.
Here are five of my favorite opening lines from SFF novels:
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians
“Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.”
In a single line, Lev Grossman already separates his ‘magic school’ novel from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, to which it is inevitably compared. Here is a hero who knows he is a magician, versus a boy on which a magical destiny is thrust. Here is a boy who wants people to notice his magic. And here is a boy longing for a world who will appreciate his ability to do magic… All this in two simple sentences.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Character often works better than setting as the subject of a stirring first line, but here Gibson uses an image so stark, arresting, and memorable that we can both clearly visualize the gray, drab world as well as sense the flat monotony of a new dystopia. Though the image itself is bleak and stagnant, that itself is the point: already we’re asking the question what kind of hero can rise above it.
C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Lewis ritually produces great first lines in the Narnia series, but this is my favorite. It introduces a character, makes terrible fun of him, and yet the addition of the word “almost” gives us hope that he has the chance—even the smallest glimmer—of being someone we might come to love. In one sentence, a protagonist is born.
M.T. Anderson’s Feed
“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”
Anderson’s vision of a future world destroyed by consumerism is ostensibly for teenagers—hence the slangy, coarse language of the first line—but there’s an entire novel planted in this opening seed. Earth is no longer a place of pleasure… the moon was targeted as a new frontier… and it has either let us down or we’ve ruined it the same way we have earth. How these three elements come to pass keeps us turning the pages until the beautiful, surprising end.
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy
“All children, except one, grow up.”
Barrie’s first line is often cited as one of the greatest openings in all of literature and it’s easy to see why. Here, in six words, he’s put us at the edge of the cliff. Who is this child that doesn’t grow up? Is he friend or is he foe? And who are we to be identifying with—the child who doesn’t grow up or the ones that do? Such big, big questions from a simple thought.
Top image by Sebastian Giacobino.
Soman Chainani‘s YA trilogy The School for Good and Evil concludes with The Last Ever After, available now from HarperCollins.
John Bellairs’ Face in the Frost:
“Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero–and not the one you’re thinking of, either.”
This is a cool list, but I bet it would be even better if we went to ten and got some women!
“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-wracked Northeast sea, is a land famous for wizards.” – A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future.” – The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe.
Oh, I can’t believe you missed the greatest of all…
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
Just sayin’ :)
Cheers,
zdrakec
“On one otherwise ordinary Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream. I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth story window.” – Monster Hunter International, Larry Correia
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” — Blood Rites by Jim Butcher.
One of my all-time favorites continues to be: “The ash fell.” Sets the whole tone for Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.
“Snow, tenderly caught by eddying breezes, swirled and spun in to and out of bright, lustrous shapes that gleamed against the emerald-blazoned black drape of sky and sparkled there for a moment, hanging, before settling gently to the soft, green-tufted plain with all the sickly sweetness of an over-written sentence.”
“Ash fell from the sky” Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn.
Instantly sets the mood in the book as we enter a quite bleak, oppressed world.
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” – Blood Rites by Jim Butcher.
Now that is an opening.
Since the list seems to be including SF, I have to include this one even though I’ve never read it:
““In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.” Steel Beach, John Varley
For one I have read, and sticking with the theme of reproductive equipment:
“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.” God’s War, Kameron Hurley
“When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away.” –Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons. Considering the narrator’s story and character, there is no better way to start her story.
“I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.” –John Scalzi, Old Man’s War. I don’t know what Mr. Scalzi did to get the grit of an old man’s voice in his work, but I heard it from this first sentence and for the entire book.
“Some people would say it’s a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library.” –Jim C. Hines, Libriomancer. I think it really captures that “Wait, what?” sort of thing that some first lines go for.
For me, the best opening line of any book ever is from “Old Man’s War”: I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I wisited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.”
Well, technically it’s three lines, but I’m going to count them as one. It’s astounding how many things you can glean from those few simple words and the very rythm of it. It sets the tone, it hints that everything might not be the same in this world, and it tells us almost everything we need to know about the narrator. If I was still in school, I could’ve written a pretty big essay about these three sentences.
Ironically, the book itself I didn’t find so impressive.
“The man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed”. Stephen King’s Gunslinger.
Hey, Mason @13, great minds think alike? :)
Although some of the examples are SF and not fantasy, my own favourite genre-related opening line has always been Iain Banks’ doozy: “It was the day my grandmother exploded”. Perfect!
“Morgon of Hed met the High One’s harpist one autumn day when the trade-ships docked at Tol for the season’s exchange of goods.”
Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed
Ditto Gunslinger’s first line (love me some SK). Also Peter S. Beagle: “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.” It only gets better from there.
Not a novel, but:
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”- The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I’m telling you he’s the one. Or as close as we’re going to get.”- Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.”- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
“Marley was dead, to begin with.”
“When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.”
The Haunting, Margaret Mahy
Not a single sentence but my all time favorite opening chapter will always and forever be Snow Crash. It’s just freaking insane. It’s a wild and brilliant short story all on it’s own.
“Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.” -The Book of Three (Prydain Chronicles) by Lloyd Alexander.
“It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.” Patrick Rothfuss —The Name of the Wind.
“This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn’t pretend to answer all or any of the these questions.” Terry Pratchett — Equal Rites
My favorite 1st line (well, lines) ever:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
It begins far, far out in space and then quickly zooms in on our solar system, our sun, our planet, the human race, and then all the way to something as small as a watch. At once, this line sets the silly, lighthearted tone of the book while also shedding light on the immense size of the universe and pointing out how our world, which seems huge and important to us, is insignificant and primitive in the grand scheme of things. How can you not continue reading after this line?!?!
I’ve been convincing people to read Uprooted by quoting its opening line: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.”
“His name was Dick Gently, and he was the hardest man he knew.”
Dawn Treader is always fun to think about since the S in C. S. Lewis stands for Staples. : )
“It was nine o’clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court when someone banged on the door.”
The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells
@21 – Knotwise, you literally chose the top three that came into my mind while reading this. Eerily well done!
The Blood Rites one above is classic Dresden. +1
I have a few fond ones not mentioned already
Theo, by occupation, was a devil. Westmark, Lloyd Alexander.
It started in mud, as many things do. Otherland: City of Golden Shadow, Tad Williams
The reflection that looked back at her from the mirror wasn’t her own. Jack of Kinrowan, Charles de Lint
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, Jacqueline Carey
It was a nice day. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
“First of all, it’s not true that I led the Martian attack on Earth. I was in Battle Cruiser Number Four. So let’s get that straight. I don’t know how these things get started. Secondly, I can explain.” – How I Conquered Your Planet, John Swartzwelder
It started in mud, as many things do. Tad Williams, Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
If I had cared to live, I would have died,
John Myers Myers – Silverlock
The abyss should shut you up – Starfish by Peter Watts.
“When is a legend legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category “Fairy-tale”?” — Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
“Among the world-girdling fortifications of a planet far distant indeed from star cluster AC 257-4736 there squatted sullenly a fortress quite similar to Helmuth’s own.”
And from Cordwainer Smiths oeuvre, Norstrilia:
Then Drunkboat, or how án American practical philosopher ghost-wrote for a dead French poet one of the wildest SFF stories in existence:
But wait, there’s more: Jorge Luis Borges, with The Aleph
And Platonov in Chevengur:
I can’t believe that no one suggested the greatest fantasy work opening sentence of all time:
Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. – Sofia Samatar.
That whole first paragraph is famously gorgeous.
I’m also fond of a pair of first lines, from Pamela Dean’s The Secret Country.
There’s a Prologue: Edward Fairchild, Prince of the Enchanted Forest, Lord of the Desert’s Edge, Friend to the Unicorns, and King of the Secret Country, wished he were somewhere else. — okay, someone’s been doing some imagining!
And there’s a Chapter One: “Who’s done what now?” — that is indeed the question.
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”
Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines.
SF rather than Fantasy really, but not the first.
You of course missed the absolute classic from A Wrinkle in Time:
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
From that sentence you know you are either going to fall into cliches or wonder. Of course, it’s the second.
“Please, miss,” said the shaggy man, “can you tell me the road to Butterfield?”
“The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”
Clive Barker, The Thief of Always
“The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.”
Dan Simmons, Hyperion
What #4 said. Hobbit FTW.
Oh, and not (primarily) a book, but…”A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
Dear You,
The body you are wearing used to be mine.
The Rook
Daniel O’Malley
“In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three.”
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Uneven book, but a great opening.
@@@@@9. Stefan
Glad somebody else had a copy of Brust’s To Reign In Hell handy! Only opening line I’ve ever read that made me do a double-take.
“It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.”
The Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. (It’s nearly all of what I remember about the book.)
“When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed whether we were sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in for hours while we lay staring out at my father’s crippled monkey perched on a flaking parapet, or telling stories, one bed to another, with soundless gestures.”
The first two sentences of Gene Wolfe’s “Fifth Head of Cerberus”
@29 – OMG. I read that book years ago, and I don’t remember if I giggled at that opening line (surely I must have!) but I am giggling now. LOL.
NEUROMANCER, yay! I will be honest – that book wasn’t my cup of tea and didn’t end up on my keeper shelf but that is still the line that comes into my head every time anybody brings up ‘best opening lines’. Sad thing is, very few people going forward are going to really get what it means!!! Are dead channels a thing anymore?
Other immediate favorites that immediately pull you in/set the tone/get you wondering are:
“In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much…”
The entire prologue of the Wheel of Time which is probably one of the greatest prologues ever: “The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened.” (and of course the famous ‘The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist.’)
And, not attempting to make any grand religious statements here, but I suppose depending on your point of view you can count it as genre, but I am a huge fan of the opening of the Gospel of John: ” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (and so on) – way different from the others, and I love the mysticism of it.
Also, I agree that ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away’ should count :) I still remember how cool that first time was :)
A couple of my favorites not yet mentioned:
“Maskelle had been asking the Ancestors to stop the rain three days running now and, as usual, they weren’t listening.” Wheel of the Infinite, Martha Wells.
“The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.” Agent of Change, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller.
One of my favorites, from one of my favorite recent books, Marcel Theroux’s Strange Bodies: “Whatever this is, it started when Nicky Slopen came back from the dead.” http://www.tor.com/2014/01/29/strange-bodies-excerpt-marcel-theroux/
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
The restaurant at the end of the Universe, by Douglas Adams.
Some days deserved to be drowned at birth and everyone sent back to bed with a hot brandy, a box of chocolates, and a warm, energetic companion. Today was without question one of those days.
the cipher, Diana Pharaoah Francsis
“If the other novice wizards on the row hadn’t broken into Raeshaldis’s rooms on the previous day, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon.” – Barbara Hambly, Sisters of the Raven
“At the height of the long wet summer of the Seventy-seventh Year of Sendovani, the Thiefmaker of Camorr paid a sudden and unannounced visit to the Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro, desperately hoping to sell him the Lamora boy.”
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson: “Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity.”
@29 & 55: Neil Gaiman riffs on the Neuromancer opening in Neverwhere:
“The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”
Not a novel, but my second favorite opening line ever comes from Kim Newman’s short story, “A Shambles in Belgravia”:
“To Professor Moriarty, she is always that bitch.”
And if you know your Sherlock Holmes, you know exactly who he’s referring to.
“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.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mae lived in the last village in the world to go online. (Air, by Geoff Ryman)
I looked at a bunch of books on my shelves, and that was the best first line I found.
This is an interesting first sentence, but too long to call a first line:
Jane Cody kept lists – Things To Do, Things To Buy, Bills To Pay, Appointments To Keep – but because she knew they provided the kind of irrefutable paper trail that almost always got people into trouble at tawdry junctures in their lives, her lists weren’t the literal truth. (True Enough, by Stephen McCauley)
This one has been quoted before, but it deserves repetition. It’s my favorite first line, ever, and cleanly sets up an entire 7 book arc:
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
I love the Grossman line so much, but I’ve always interpreted it as Quentin doing one of his “magic” (i.e. sleight of hand) tricks with a coin or whatever rather than the actual magic he discovers later. I actually thought that made it a better line, as when he actually learns real magic (spoiler alert) nobody much cares.
On a windless summer day in an uncertain year, more than a century after the founding of Cornell, a man who told lies for a living climbed to the top of The Hill to fly a kite.
— Fool on the Hill, Matt Ruff
Strictly, this is the first line of Chapter 1, following about three pages of prologue. But I think it counts for the present purpose.
My favorite beginning line is from the newest novel by Neal Stephenson, Seveneves. “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” A real wait-what moment. And from that line, I was hooked.
And of course, there’s Clive Barker – The Hellbound Heart, filmed as Hellraiser:
Weaveworld:
Imajica:
Myself, I think Clive Barker cribbed that last observation from Shakespeare. :)
Since a couple of people have mentioned opening lines from other media, I’ll toss in the first line from Bastion:
It may be a media tie-in but I never forgot the opening line of Barbara Hambly’s Star Wars novel, Children of the Jedi:
Poisoned rain speared from an acid sky.
It has very little to do with the themes of the rest of the book, unlike some other opening lines cited, but it tells you immediately that you’re in the hands of an author who really cares about euphony. Each syllable is a different vowel, and they flow off the tongue wonderfully well.
This is from Cordwainer Smith’s short story, “The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal.” It’s also more than one line, but how can you resist this?
Do not read this story; turn the page quickly. The story may upset you.
Anyhow, you probably know it already. It is a very disturbing story.
Everyone knows it. The glory and the crime of Commander Suzdal have been
told in a thousand different ways. Don’t let yourself realize that the
story really is the truth.
It isn’t. Not at all. There’s not a bit of truth to it. There is no such
planet as Arachosia, no such people as klopts, no such world as Catland.
These are all just imaginary, they didn’t happen, forget about it, go
away and read something else.
“Dirk Moller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident, but he was willing to give it a try.”
– Scalzi, The Android’s Dream
The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.
We aren’t given the first line of the novel until fifty-two pages in. These two short sentences along with the remainder of what is honestly the first paragraph of the book are like a punch in the gut. Whatever hope that we might have conjured up is stripped away from us right here, the rest of the book is a slow ponderous bleak brutal compelling death march. The world, life, the future is gone, taken away in a single shear of light.
The Road has to be one of the ten best books ever written, I dropped The Bible to make room for it on the list. I think that I was right.
I know it’s a SF, but when talking about great opening lines, this one simply cannot stay unmentioned:
“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”
John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
Not a SF book, but this one always makes me laugh… “If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of year for it.” The Teacher’s Funeral
That year the Ribeiros’ daffodils seeded early, and they seeded cockroaches
— Mirabile, Janet Kagan
@68 “I love the Grossman line so much, but I’ve always interpreted it as Quentin doing one of his “magic” (i.e. sleight of hand) tricks with a coin or whatever rather than the actual magic he discovers later.”
Your interpretation is correct, as Grossman makes clear. But Quentin IS a slight of hand magician at least, and is certainly open to becoming the real thing.. maybe that’s what Chainani meant?
Such a good line. Tells you everything about Quentin’s child-like (childish?) fascination with magic and how that has been received by the world at large. Also, it foreshadows his experience with real magic– the initial attraction vs disillusionment.
If that wasn’t enough, it’s a line that is likely to make the reader (who after all has just chosen to pick up a FANTASY novel) sympathize with Quentin.
Not SFF but still great opening lines, I think.
“It was the day my grandmother exploded” — The Crow Road, Iain Banks
and
“The boys down on the Low Quay knew a hundred ways to sell bad fish” — The Dress Lodger, Sheri Holman.
Agree the openers for Blood Rites and The Gunslinger are excellent beginnings!
Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House”
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
For me, the best opening line(s) is and probably always will be from Brandon Sanderson’s novella “Legion”: “My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.”
Brilliant! Just brilliant!
And of course Yaaaay!!!! to the hobbit living in a hole in the ground :) Classic.
RobMRobM @42 – I remember reading it for the first time. At first, it was “Daf***k??????” (sorry for the language), and then I laughed for several minutes. Especially when taken together with the next sentence :)
And of course, the turning of the Wheel of Time that Lisamarie beat me to, I got chills every time I read it.
Still, my number one vote is Stephen’s claim :)
“So there I was, tied to an altar made of outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians” – Alcatraz and the Evil Librarians, Brandon Sanderson. If you love to read and love libraries as awesome places to get free books, how can your attention not be grabbed by this?
“The Prince was dead. Since the king was not, no unseemly rejoicing dared show in the faces of the men atop the castle gate.” – The Hallowed Hunt, Lois McMaster Bujold. Well, now you know everything you really need to about that particular prince!
“In defense of Althalus, it should be noted that he was in very tight financial circumstances and more than a little tipsy when he agreed to undertake the theft of the Book” – The Redemption of Althalus, David Eddings. I love this sentence because it really gives a good idea of Althalus and his character. And it’s very matter of fact, too. I love beginnings that are practical even more than I love the insane beginnings!
Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith. — Stranger in a Strange Land (uncut)
You know immediately that, one way or another, this is a fantasy.
Only the most paranoid clients phone me in my sleep … Quarantine, Greg Ega
I am so proud this is my first post and is it a doozie of opening lines. I’m surprised no one has mentioned it, even if it isn’t a book’s opening lines, it spawned many a SF novel afterwards:
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
I was always partial to The Thing on the Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft as an effective first line:
“It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.”
And, of course, 1984:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
The opening line I always, always go back to is:
“It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try and kill you.” – The Trumps of Doom, Roger Zelazny.
Am sure someone must have already posted this one, but I’ll post it as well. this first line is solely responsible for my love of books, when I read this at age 15 in August of 2000, everything changed.
“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I’m telling you he’s the one. Or as close as we’re going to get.” Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
“Grandfather was a tree.
Father grew trux, in fifteen colours.
Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them. Around we go, and round…”
Hearts, Hands and Voices, by Ian McDonald (also published as The Broken Land).
There’s a prologue, but then:
“I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.”
– The Inverted World, by Christopher Priest.
Certainly not “perfect,” nor, strictly speaking, an opening line
(but close to it) is this from an article by Mark Twain: “I am quite
sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I
have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.”
Naive readers unaware Twain’s toying with them are driven mad
trying to figure out what ethnic group “bar one” refers to.
I think brevity in a first line can go a long way to snaring a reader’s attention. Some quick hooks from a few of my favorite writers:
“The world ended in less than seven days.”
Warrior from the Shadowland, Cassandra Gannon
“No one could say he hadn’t been warned.”
Sewer, Gas and Electric, Matt Ruff
“‘What a bunch of f*ckups!'”
The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, Gorman Bechard
And then, of course there’s seeding the first sentence with just enough information that stopping would be impossible:
“If she hadn’t been insane before Cinderella tossed her into the nuthouse, she’d definitely gone full blown crazy since she’d been there.”
Wicked Ugly Bad, Cassandra Gannon
“The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage’s tall chain-link fence shortly after the hyperphase gate powered down.”
Wen Spencer, Tinker
You really can’t go wrong reading the rest of any of these books or their series.
The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. They set forth at daybreak to see a man beheaded, twenty in all, and Bran rode among them, nervous with excitement. This was the first time he had been deemed old enough to go with his lord father and his brothers to see the king’s justice done. It was the ninth year of summer, and the seventh of Bran’s life.
And I had forgotten Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children:
And how can one resist Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy
Share and Enjoy!
“His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.” – Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
The man walked across the desert.
And the desert destroyed the man.
El Sombra by Al Ewing.
One of the few opening lines that really stuck with me.
Plus its a cracking good read.
Even the wind now held its breath.
Dawn of Wonder by Jonathan Renshaw
hooked me from the first line.
“I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged.” Chime by Franny Billingsley
“It was a dumb thing to do but it wasn’t that dumb.” Sunshine by Robin McKinley
“Kalen stared down at his feet and wondered what had happened to his boots.” Storm Without End by RJ Blain
But he did not die.
The Last Guardian: David Gemmell
“Lessa woke, cold.” Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
“As I left the Kenya Beanstalk capsule he was right on my heels. He followed me through the door leading to Customs, Health, and Immigration. As the door contracted behind him I killed him.” Friday by Robert Heinlein
“Killashandra listened as the words dropped with leaden fatality into her frozen belly. She stared at the maestro’s famous profile as his lips opened and shut around the words that meant the death of all her hopes and ambitions and rendered ten years of hard work and study a waste.” Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey
Kudos for those who added lines from The Book of Three and The Hobbit! Really, so many openings that hooked our interest, pulled us in, and kept us moving on an adventure and didn’t let us go until we were done.
“Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often.”
– The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley
I’ve read this book about a million times, but the first line still gets me!
Hard to say where it fits in genres, but John Dies at the End certainly qualified.
“Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – 1984
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. – Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
“I killed my first man, today.” Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
“It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.” Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
I also agree with #3, #4, #29, and #47
Not a first line, but even the first line is haunting:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.