First Lines
Feb. 1st, 2003 01:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handsliveI was intrigued by this meme as well, but in a different way.
I make no apology for what I'm about to do. :-)
These are not first lines of favourite books. Rather, guilty books. Some of them are very good. Some of them are atrocious. I've carefully culled from an astounding list to try and bring you a very special set of first lines. What I think of as defining lines.
What I mean by that will be seen in the examples, but it comes down to this: You would know as soon as you read an opening line like this exactly what kind of book it was going to be. In some cases you'd only be sort of wrong; in others you'd be exactly right.
Because this is, without a doubt, an atrocity, I am supplying more than 10 first lines. Instead, I have an even baker's dozen. I swear I tried to cram in a line from Lois McMaster Bujold (had one picked out from Brothers in Arms), but these 13 were better.
Uniformed LAPD Officer Joe Pike could hear the banda music even with the engine idling, the a.c. jacked to meat locker, and the two-way crackling call out codes to other units.
This story begins where I did something illegal, had two rows with women, one pub fight, and got a police warning, all before mid-afternoon.
If you consider the Milky Way galaxy as a great wheel turning ponderously through space, then you may regard the Palethetic Cluster as a clot of earth tossed up by that wheel as it pounds down eternity's highway.
The Great Diaspora of the human race which started more than two millennia ago when the Libbey-Scheffield Drive was disclosed, and which continues to this day and shows no sign of slowing, made the writing of history as a single narrative -- or even many compatible narratives -- impossible.
The great granite mound called Tor Al'Kiir crouched like a malevolent toad in the night, wearing a crown of toppled walls and ruined columns, memories of failed attempts by a score of Ophirean dynasties to build there.
"Thinner," the old Gypsy man with the rotting nose whispers to William Halleck as Halleck and his wife, Heidi, come out of the courthouse.
Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and sorceries.
"Gentlemen," Ambassador Earlyworm said, and paused, peering in turn at the faces of each of the subordinate diplomats seated behind meticulously aligned yellow pads and needle-sharp pencils along the twelve-foot zum-wood conference table, with an expression that strongly suggested he employed the appellation as a courtesy only.
The sublime Emperor Constans, born to the Purple, lord of New Rome, or Constantinopolis, or Byzantium -- depending upon whether you were flattering the Emperor, writing a history book, or just trying to ask the way -- stamped furiously into his marbled audience chamber, his sparse hair disordered, his crown of gilded laurels bent at a rakish angle over one ear, striving vainly -- and messily -- to shake the richly assorted clods of horse dung off his stiff gilded robes.
The shot heard round the world had been stilled for almost two centuries when an Iowa banker did something far more significant for American independance than fire a musket ball at the Redcoats.
The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.
The old man with the bent shoulders came out of the rain, furling his janomegasa -- his rice-paper umbrella -- as if it were a ship's sail.
The music all that morning had been of the militant type that had dominated the airwaves for the past few weeks; but to the discerning ear there was a grim undertone to it that hadn't been there since the very start of the alien invasion.
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Date: 2003-02-02 06:56 am (UTC)-J