The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.
What makes a great opening line?
191–200 of 202 posts
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#192“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live, will remember it.”
The actual opening line of Lord of the Rings is so disappointing and unremarkable though: "When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
It is almost intentional? Its like this mythic tale about adventure and it starts with a birthday party of a Hobbit living in a small village.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#193“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.”
Peeked into the dark sea where the old ones reside...
i mean, if you do the derivation of the boltzmann equation, you can clearly see cthulu for a short while after you apply stirling's approximation
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must admit, that opening line did very little for me. Neither did the rest of the book.
The book is a Kunstlerroman. It tracks his development from infancy to adulthood. I admit the first part of the book isn't nearly as interesting as the later parts. It's still my favorite novel ever, and I'm convinced Joyce might be the greatest English writer.
I agree that that's what the book does. But it never made me care about the individual it was tracking, and that ruined everything else. If I don't care about the main character or the person he's talking to, why do I care about the conversation? Even more, why do I care about the exhaustive details of the route they walked while they were having the conversation?
The main character gives his (and Joyce's?) theory of art: art should not create any response in the viewer. If it does, it mars the purity of the art. Joyce may be a great author; he certainly succeeded in writing a book that created no response whatsoever in me (other than annoyance at the time I wasted plowing through the tedium of something that I didn't care about whatsoever). That may be great art, but I don't have to like it.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual opening line of Lord of the Rings is so disappointing and unremarkable though: "When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton."
It is almost intentional? Its like this mythic tale about adventure and it starts with a birthday party of a Hobbit living in a small village.
I don't think it was entirely intentional. I think it's the random mix of two narratives: the more childish The Hobbit, which grew out of stories for Tolkien's child, and the more serious and for grownups The Silmarillion. Tolkien wanted to write about the latter but publishers felt the readers wanted "more hobbits".
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#196> Theo, by occupation, was a devil.
Maybe not the greatest, but the whole paragraph’s pretty good:
> Theo, by occupation, was a devil. That is, he worked as apprentice and general servant to Anton, the printer. Before that, he was lucky enough to be an orphan, for the town fathers of Dorning prided themselves in looking after their needy. So, instead of sending him away to a King's Charity House, where he would be made miserable, they arranged the same for him locally. He was farmed out first to a cooper, then to a saddler, and in both cases did badly. Accidentally, he had learned to read, which in some opinion spoiled him for anything sensible. Anton finally agreed to take in the boy and teach him his trade.
And the rest of the page is great, and the rest of the chapter, and the whole book is a really great opening to a decent trilogy IMO (Westmark, by Lloyd Alexander).
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#197Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
This is poetic and all, but I fail to see why it’s so great. I’m am curious.
You should stick to Harry Potter.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#198>There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it. >I have just been informed, that the debate over the question ‘is it right or wrong to have immortal souls’ has been finally brought to a conclusion. >I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I w…
I created a short book that was written and illustrated by AI. Here's the first line:
> Let me tell you, death is boring.
I hadn't read that line in about a year, so it was cool to look back at.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#199“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Unfortunately, television is digital now and dead channels are just black.
An iconic opening line indeed! Doubly interesting because no-one, not even Gibson himself, can tell what visual imagery he was thinking of with that description. I always thought it was "gray snow/static", but TVs didn't always show that (they certainly don't today, as you pointed out). Depending on the era, dead channels alternated between black, static snow, blue, etc; when Gibson was talking dead channels it wasn'…
In 1984, when Neuromancer was published, TV was analog and inbetween channels you got static snow. Gibson had to mean that. A grey/white overcast sky.
Everything else is over-thinking.
I love Neuromancer but the irony is how badly cyberpunk or indeed any sci-fi has predicted the future, the absence of smartphones being the most obvious example.
Re: What makes a great opening line?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
An iconic opening line indeed! Doubly interesting because no-one, not even Gibson himself, can tell what visual imagery he was thinking of with that description. I always thought it was "gray snow/static", but TVs didn't always show that (they certainly don't today, as you pointed out). Depending on the era, dead channels alternated between black, static snow, blue, etc; when Gibson was talking dead channels it wasn'…
In 1984, when Neuromancer was published, TV was analog and inbetween channels you got static snow. Gibson had to mean that. A grey/white overcast sky. Everything else is over-thinking. I love Neuromancer but the irony is how badly cyberpunk or indeed any sci-fi has predicted the future, the absence of smartphones being the most obvious example.
If you read the scifi.se Q&A I linked to, which mentions several contradictory answers given by Gibson over the years, you'll see it's not so simple and definitely not overthinking it!
Analog TVs didn't always give static snow, by the way.
One of Gibson's latest answers is a retweet of Monica Lewinsky's (yes, that Monica) photo of a cloudy gray day and stating "that's exactly what I was thinking of". It looks nothing at all like an analog's TV static snow!