Microblog Memes

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

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.

David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1984

The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off

it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer

Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:

Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.

I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"

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

I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs, began to take hold.

Fear and loathing in las vegas

“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

The building was on fire, and this time it was not my fault.

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files

Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

• It, by Stephen King.

Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.

The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.

And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.

And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go.

Terry Pratchett - Small Gods

Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife's grave. Then, I joined the army.

• John Scalzi, Old Man's War

If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.

– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

This is my favorite opening line:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."

• Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

Late to the party, but:

A vessel may be defined as an object that keeps the water either in or out; it is the latter sort that concerns us.

The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor

Let's go with something more somber.

Lolita, 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.

-Lolita by Nabokov

It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.

And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.

I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King

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.

Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.

Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.

If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, "it was a dark and stormy night." There's a reason it became cliche. It's very evocative.

Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

-John Dies at the End

And my personal favorite...

I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.

-The Unnoticeables

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday's autobiography.

I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.

"The small boys came early to the hanging."

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.

— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North

A, abbrev., amperes

words to live by

“So… You’ll cut my head off.” I raised an eyebrow at the salescritter. I was baiting him. I knew it, he knew it, I knew he knew it.

We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Honestly it doesn't do the series justice, but it's still a standout.

Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.