The last book that got its hooks into me struck at Chengis Khan airport in Ulanbaatar. A friend and I were returning from a long stay off the grid with Kazakh nomads in Mongolia’s far west. We were saddle sore from a trip across the Altai mountains in a Russian jeep, suffering from intestinal parasites, and reeking of yak dung. But we had Kindles, and something passing (in Mongolia) for Wi-Fi. “Read this,” my friend said, and stuck this opening under my nose:
“If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close.” –The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Brady Udall.
Thank God for books. They can take you from anywhere, to anywhere. Not all of them do it as precipitously as Edgar Mint—there are ways to be transported that don’t involve such a dozy of a first step—but as an author myself I swoon over such writing.
I swoon mostly with envy. Beginnings are hard. Or, at least, beginnings are hard for me. For instance: the first scene in my new book, The Scorpion Rules, depicts a small classroom full of hostages pretending to discuss history, while actually watching the slow approach of a horsemen who’s coming to kill one of them. I must have redrafted that scene a dozen times, and I’m still not sure of all of it. But I like the moment where the narrator turns her head and sees, out the window and across the sweep of post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan, a faint plume of dust.
It’s not easy to hang a world off a smudge on the horizon—but it’s much, much harder to hang a world off a single sentence. Here are five YA science fiction and fantasy books that succeeded.
Feed by M.T. Anderson
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
Sometimes—often—it’s all about voice. Of course there’s world building happening here too. This single sentence suggests a society advanced enough to make travel to the moon on par with a drive to Vegas. It shows the extremes of jaded you can get when you combine teen and tech. In fact, it encapsulates the novel in perfect miniature, which is (to use a technical author term) a hell of a thang.
But really, what I fell for in this single sentence is the voice of the narrator, Titus. By the end of the first page, his fumbling reaches beyond the shallow, beyond the world of himself and his brain-implant-facebook, the titular Feed, already had me. I was ready for him to break my heart.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
The first thing you find you when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.
Another world contained in a single sentence. Another voice to love. Oh, Todd. It’s been years since I first read this book, but I have not yet recovered enough to be coherent about it. With a backstory involving a plague of involuntary telepathy, Knife is about voices, essentially. About who gets to speak and who doesn’t; about what’s understood and what’s misunderstood; about the difference between what one thinks and what one does; about connections; about power. About speech itself.
Or to put it another way: There’s a sweet kid. He has a talking dog. Obviously things go well for them.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
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.
My husband read this one out loud to me. He read the first sentence and I said: “excuse me?” and he said: “you heard me.” Mortal Engines is not the Reeve book I’m over the moon for—that would be Larklight—but I cannot think of a better exemplar for the kind of science fiction opening that says: “buckle up, kids.”
I mostly come to science fiction and fantasy looking for character-driven stuff with the occasional dragon attack, but there is no denying the pleasure of the occasional whirlwind tour of a genuinely new world. Mortal Engines promises such a ride, and delivers.
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
Day One: My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years.
I once heard Joseph Boyden say one key to keeping readers is making them a promise on the first page. He spoke of his own book, in which one character has an addiction to morphine, a two-day supply, and a three-day journey home. Three-Day Road, it’s called. I dare you not to read it.
I also dare you not to read Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days, which is a Mongolian-flavored retelling of the fairy tale Maid Maleen: a princess defies her father, who seals into a tower for seven years. One faithful servant refuses to leave her lady’s side. But seven years is a long time, and the food is running low…
Call a book a Book of A Thousand Days, and open day one with the only window being bricked up slowly? Do you promise? Because I’m yours.
Chime by Franny Billingsley
I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged. Now, if you please.
Talk about swooning. Here is a first line that has it all. A voice—I have an unfortunate thing for well-spoken murderers—a promise, a slow-building world. If you like the first page, you’ll like the book. If you don’t, well… we probably can’t be friends.
Top image: Fanart of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines by Julia Zhuravieva.
Erin Bow is the author of three novels: Plain Kate, Sorrow’s Knot, and the just released science fiction thriller The Scorpion Rules, which opens: We were studying the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand when we saw the plume of dust.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”
Anything by Terry Pratchett
“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”
Well, I read a preview chapter for Trudi Canavan’s The Magician’s Apprentice as well as an interview about how she feels that the first line has to be something that captures the imagination, the first sentence of the book is –
There was no fast and painless way to perform an amputation, Tessia knew. Not if you did it properly. A neat amputation required a flap of skin to be cut to cover the stump, and that took time.
The first few pages give a description of the amputation of a small boy’s finger, not what I’d call an awesome opening but it was certainly memorable. Unfortunately for me at the exact time I started reading this my dad started to put up a new blind above the kitchen window, unfortunate because it was a little too long so he had to cut a bit off the length of the metal rail. It took a few moments to realize it but my reading of an amputation was suddenly accompanied by the squealing, screaming, sawing sound of metal as a hacksaw is applied to it.
I needed a break to get the noise out of my head.
“It was the day my Grandmother Exploded”
Iain Banks
The Crow Road
@1 I second that.
Speaking of voice:
Sarah Monette
Melusine
High-rise by JG Ballard:
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
It’s an opening paragraph, but nevertheless, awesome:
“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.”
“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
Roger Zelazny is a master of enticing opening sentences: “It is a pain in the ass waiting for someone to kill you,” in Trumps of Doom is just one example and it has stuck with me. I also commend the first couple of paragraphs of his short story “This Moment of the Storm” to your attention.
Steven Brust also does well. The first lines of any of his Vlad Taltos stories will drag you in, and he may have been too playful in his standalone To Reign in Hell.
“If I had cared to live, I would have died.”
Silverlock by John Myers Myers.
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.”
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson, 2015
“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. See also:
http://www.tor.com/2009/08/12/once-upon-a-time/
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
“See the child.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
“When the polar ice advanced as far as Nottingham, my school was closed and I was evacuated to Mars.”
Sophia McDougall, Mars Evacuees
And then there’s the classic:
“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”
Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash, 1992
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
or
Anathem, 2008
Do your neighbors burn one another alive?
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Neuromancer. William Gibson. 1984.
@@@@@ JAWolf: A line that hasn’t aged well…
“The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman.
That’s not the opening sentence so it’s not really relevant to the larger discussion. These are:
“In five years the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman.
Steel Beach, John Varley
“In the raucous cathedral square the crowd prepared to hang a pig.”
Rats and Gargoyles, Mary Gentle.
Dorsai!
Gordon R Dickson
I really like the first sentece of “Red Rising” by Pierce Brown:
“I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war.“
And now I must try to read every book in this article and the ones in the comments (that I haven’t read already) immediately! :)
“Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang.” (From Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder.)
Thats one of my favorites, right up there with the famous first sentence of 1984 (“… and the clocks were striking thirteen”) in the way it throws the reader off stride and signals that this is a very different world.
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”
Bad Billy Burroughs “Naked Lunch”: “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train… Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me.” Wackiness ensues.
The first three lines of The Martian – Andy Weir.
I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.
Yes! Thank you! Finally, some love for Mortal Engines. It is so, so good and it deserves so much more attention than it gets. I implore everyone to read it at once.
“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 visit.” Anthony Burgess, “Earthly Powers”
“Imagine you had to break someone’s arm. Right or left, doesn’t matter.” Hugh Laurie, “The Gun Seller”
More Scalzi, from After the Coup (available for free on this Tor.com website):
“How well can you take a punch?” asked Deputy Ambassador Schmidt.
Or, of course, the epic first sentence from the Shadow War of the Night Dragons:
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….
‘Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to murder a king.’
“‘Today,’ King Elhokar announced, riding beneath the bright open sky, ‘is an excellent day to slay a god. Wouldn’t you say?'”
Those were not book openers, but chapter openers from The first part of the first volume of the Stormlight Archives. They’re some of the best opening sentences I’ve ever read.
Garcia Marquez, Cien Anos
Proust, Swann’s Way
“The story thus 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.
The opening lines to Hitchhiker’s aren’t as good.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
–Ray Bradbury, FARENHEIT 451
@Mays
Also done with style many years back by Guy Gavriel Kay.
It was just past midday, not long before the third summons to prayer, that Ammar ibn Khairan passed through the Gate of the Bells and entered the palace of Al-Fontina in Silvenes to kill the last of the khalifs of Al-Rassan.
– The Lions of Al-Rassan
Actually he has a knack for showing a setting in the first few words.
Both moons were high, dimming the light of all but the brightest stars.
– Tigana
The woods came to the edge of the property; to the gravel of the drive, the electronic gate and the green twisted-wire fence that kept out the boars.
– Ysabel
Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiendy so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City.
– Sailing to Sarantium
In the spaces of calm almost lost in what followed, the question of why tended to surface.
– The Summer Tree
The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.
Agent of Change, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
This has long been one of my favorite first lines.
Unlike obviously a lot of commenters and readers in general, I guess I’m not a big fan of what I would describe as “showy” first sentences in books. It just always seemed gimicky to me – like the author spent an inordinate amount of time thinking of the perfect first sentence as a kind of “gotcha” hook. I’m much more of a reader who will read the first chapter of a book to see if my interest is piqued or not. So, some of my favorite books have pretty simple first lines (note for anyone cross-checking – I don’t count Prologues. These are the first lines from Chapter 1 proper).
It was raining. The Diamond Throne by David Eddings
The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. Game of Thrones by GRR Martin
There are a bunch more examples, but in looking through the bookshelf, I think I have more books that I love that have very simple opening sentences. I like the feeling of in media res when it’s done that way.
That being said, several of the mentioned lines are really good (The Martian example is a good one), and there are some books that I love that have more flourishy openers (Wheel of Time, for instance), so maybe I’m just being a hypocrite.
@38 – or “I am afraid.” Bujold’s Barrayar.
“They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years.”
Theodore Sturgeon, “The Dreaming Jewels”
“At first, Potiphar Breen did not notice the girl who was undressing.”
Heinlein was one of the best at good first sentences.
@38: I’m fond of the opening of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell:
“Some years ago in the city of York there was a society of magicians.”
– not particularly showy, but definitely intriguing.
And for the ultimate in unshowy, Jane Eyre‘s “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” Not much is said, but rather a lot is implied in that simple sentence.
I also like the opener of LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness:
“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.” Perfect, for the story we’re going to hear and for the part that this book and others– not like it, exactly– but others in our favorite genre have played in shaping our imaginations and therefore our Truths.
“The bow I carry with me, I made of Este.
She died just before dawn, ten days ago.”
The Vorrh – Brian Catling
o
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. Crash, by JG Ballard.
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. [The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]
“It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.”
I was ten the first time I read “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, and the opening line has haunted me for over twenty years.
@45
YES, another favorite! :D
Olfactory, the first of my five senses that funcitoned fully, hinted I was in deep shit well before the other four confirmed I was in fact truly fucked.
Chapter 1: In which Cimorene refuses to be proper and has a conversation with a frog.
And in case you don’t consider a chapter heading as real “first sentence,” the ACTUAL first sentence is:
Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable.
“There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.” – The Black Company, Glen Cook
Yes, it’s not science fiction (although I consider it fantasy) and surely not YA, but since someone invoked Burroughs, I was hooked from this…(now it seems almost juvenile)
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Not to be the token Sandersonian in the comment thread, but
“Prince Raoden of Arelon awoke early that morning, completely unaware that he had been damned for all eternity.”
and
“So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.”
(All the Alcatraz books start like that, in media res.)
Also, not to do another shameless plug, but the first few lines of the “Shadows of Self” prologue are fun, too:
Waxillium Ladrian, lawman for hire, swung off his horse and turned to face the saloon.
“Aw,” the kid said, hopping down from his own horse. “You didn’t catch your spur on the stirrup and trip.”
“That happened once,” Waxillium said.
“Yeah, but it was super funny.”
The capitals are mine. Remember almost all of the early Genesis account was oral history.
Not a YA book…though I think I read it as a young adult.
But…
“Bad things always happen during the night.”
Julie Garwood, Ransom.
She ends the first chapter with the same sentence. It’s just…potent.
She was Our Mother, so she cried.
George Alec Effinger – What Entropy Means to Me.
“The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.” — Kuttner & Moore, “The Fairy Chessmen”.
Almost anything by Beagle. “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone” is the one everyone knows, but I’m especially fond of “The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.” (from his first novel, A Fine and Private Place.) (Technically neither of these is YA, but non-violent fantasy was still being treated as YA when these came out.)
One of my favourite opening lines ever is:
It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant.
From Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.
I guess it’s the chapter heading rather than the first line, but this is one of my recent favorites:
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.”
From “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” by Laini Taylor.
“The prophet was drowning men on Great Wyk when they came to tell him that the king was dead.“
Martin’s Feast for Crows. Not brilliant, but I always thought it raised a lot of questions.
It’s always been a tie for me:
“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.” – Clive Barker, The Thief of Always.
“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” – Frank Herbert, Dune
Those have always stuck out in my mind.