Great First Lines

Observation Deck
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The first line or phrase of a poem, essay, novel, movie, or sprawling history is crucial. But how to create one?

Perhaps the best approach is to look at what has worked before. “Call me Ishmail”, from Moby Dick, immediately bonds the reader and narrator. " It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…", from A Tale of Two Cities, drops the reader squarely into the story’s world - total immersion in one step. Dickens then goes on to construct one of the greatest opening paragraphs in literature, beautifully and poignantly listing the many dichotomies of the human condition.

Science Fiction offers some of the greatest opening lines of all. Perhaps it has an advantage because this genre is all about “what if?”. Curiosity, adventure, disorientation, aspiration, warning, and humanity all spring from that simple question.

Two of the greatest sci-fi novels of all time simply threw the reader off-kilter right at the start:
“A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories” - BNW (1932)
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

The first line of FOUNDATION as I read it as a young farm boy sitting in a tree was “His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.” Hooked. The original (1942) version was “Hari Seldon was old and tired.” Meh. From FOUNDATION’S TRIUMPH (1999) “Little is known about the final days of Hari Seldon…” Ah, better.

Movies too:
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” (SW)
“The world is changed.” (LOTR)
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century…" (WOTW)
“Rosebud.” (Wells & Welles, a fun rabbit hole)

I’m not a prolific or skilled reader. I ask, what are some other great openings in science fiction?

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A few that have stiuck in my mind, though some are more “descriptive” than others

“Lot ninety-seven. A boy,” from CotG

If a man comes in dresssed like a kick and acting as if he ownws the place, he’s a spaceman - DS

To be skipper of the only boat on the Moon was a distinction that Pat Harris enjoyed - AFoM

The hunting is good in Europe twenty-thousand years ago - Delenda Est.

Olsen was cracking up - The Power

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And of course, there’s the tried and true hook method - curiosity. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea:

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.

Or simply the chapter title, “A Shifting Reef”.

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A MAN WITH BINOCULARS. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.

– The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton

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Amazing. I knew it was ANDROMEDA STRAIN before I even finished reading your post. And I never read the book. I almost had to go into therapy to get over the scare the movie gave me.

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Best opening line I’ve ever read is the one from Gibson’s Neuromancer:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

In a few words, it manages to simultaneously set a tone that is both futuristic and noir.

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It’s funny, I quote that line all the time, but not in this topic. I was living in Vancouver when I read NEUROMANCER. Wikipedia (William Gibson - Wikipedia) describes that town as his “adopted home”. The line perfectly described the view from our condo balcony.

I had a job there working with embedded systems and low-level software, which felt very much like ‘Cyberpunk’ in ‘Cyberspace’. Good times.

That ‘dead channel sky’ was the primary reason that my wife wanted us to move back to sunny Toronto (which we did).

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That line is indelible to me, too. I’m old enough to know what a television “tuned to a dead channel” looks like. :sweat_smile: