The First Lines Game

Simple rules. Anyone can post the opening sentence of a science fiction or fantasy book,and anyone can answer. No googling for the answer,but if you think you know the author,you can ask about it. If you have an inkling and you have the book on your shelf,you can unearth it.
If you know the title please show the quote first,then add your answer
After a few days,maybe a week,if no one has guessed correctly, the original poster can choose to either give the answer,or give clues to point the way.
Anyone can comment on the revealed book,or author, if they want to..
Good luck! :0)

First Lines

"Rocky, would you take a look at this?"

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade.

OK two sentences,but they sort of go together!

If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he's a spaceman.

>4 dustydigger: That's got the be Heinlein. Double Star, maybe?

Ah,the Great Lorenzo (at least according to him!). Probably RAHs most fully realised character,who,ironically, then promptly spends a lifetime impersonating someone else! Really its just an oldfashioned impersonation tale in the Prisoner of Zenda mold,. I found myself wishing we saw more of the interesting aliens barely mentioned in passing

I'll play if we can have the restriction that the book has to have been first published in, oh, the last quarter-century. Call it since 1990 just to make it a nice round number. I've been playing this game for a long time and am really tired of everyone pulling out the same old decades-old ones every single time. It's gotten to the point where I know lots of first lines for books I have no intention of ever reading because I've seen them in this game a dozen times or more.

With that stipulation, here's one:

"All right, he's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."

>7 lorax:

I'm pretty sure your line there is neither UBIK nor Necroville, probably my two favorite sf stories that involve talking with dead people.

Here's one for a book I haven't yet read:

Monkey never dies.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

You are correct. Ubik's too old to qualify with my restriction at any rate.

Being bound by the "published after 1990" made this much, much harder, and it's from a book I haven't yet read (of course, picking it up to read the first line made me want to not put it back down, but I'm tough, and I set it aside).

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense Against Disease.

>11 Lyndatrue:, World War Z?

Edit: Nope, lol

Sorry for typo that I just now caught (in >11 Lyndatrue:).

Lorax, I know the answer, but I know it unfairly (in >7 lorax:), so I'll probably just wait until someone else comes up with it.

By unfairly, I mean that I was looking at the author, for other reasons, on Amazon, and saw those words.

Einstein Intersection

>7 lorax: Distress by Greg Egan?

eta:Right! Egan's best novel IMO.

First Line

"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries."

>7 lorax: No problem,Lorax,it could have been published last week even,though not a lot of people might know it. But a lot of people have read the famous books from 1950 - 1990,so just ignore them if you want to,but it gives lots of people a chance. Just be prepared to give us old dinosaurs some clues when we are scratching our head over the modern books! :0)h

>14 joeteo1: Correct Joe! By the always fascinating Samuel R Delany. You may not always get everything old Chip says,but its always fascinating anyway! :0)

btw,it is helpful to link with the original post,in this case #3

First Line

Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head.

First Line

In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did every single night.

>17 dustydigger:

But a lot of people have read the famous books from 1950 - 1990,so just ignore them if you want to,

Oh well, it was just a suggestion. I'll be ignoring the thread, then, as you suggest. The entire reason for my suggestion was that everyone's already read those and done a few dozen rounds of this game with them, and I was hoping for some new challenges.

There's no reason why you cant do your own thread, of post 2000 titles for instance. The more diversity and fun the better!
Anyone can post any title,from any decade,here,no restrictions

First Line

Makakai,are you ready?

First Line

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.

>24 artturnerjr: "At the Mountains of Madness", H. P. Lovecraft

(Added First Line note to my 16 above)

>25 dukedom_enough:

Nailed it! (And for those of you that are saying, "Lovecraft's horror, not SF", that one was originally published in Astounding Stories, so :P ;))

I guess that was way too easy, huh? Let me try a slightly tougher one:

First Line

She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.

>23 dustydigger: Startide Rising by David Brin

>2 dustydigger: "Rocky, would you take a look at this?"

Titan by John Varley.

Took me a while... (this was one of those inklings that needed to be unearthed)

>29 ScoLgo: Correct,ScoLgo. I thought you would get it,we talked about Varley recently.I havent got round to the rest of the Gaea trilogy yet.Maybe next year.

>16 dukedom_enough:
"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries."
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

It seems a rather quiet,matter of fact beginning to a book till you think about it! lol.
I am so looking forward to reading that book. I am about 70 pages into Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and while difficult to follow so far the whole setting of the ''Zones'' is really intriguing. I'm a sucker for multi species bookse.g.(big Startide Rising fan)and the way they interact with humans.

Aarrgghh! Oh boy,we old shelfarians really suffer from the lack of nesting for discussions. It making for confusion and messiness.
Oh well,we are still learning. It would be best then if, like Thomas in post #24, a responder adds the title in the post,so question and answer are together without having click back to the original post.
I'll pop back up to the top and add that

>27 artturnerjr: No problem with adding weird fiction,horror or fantasy,Art,many of us are eclectic readers of SF in its broadest sense of ''speculative fiction'',so no restrictions in Dusty's bar!

>3 dustydigger: Delaney one of the ace doubles. Maybe ballad of beta-2?

edited to add Damn yes einstein intersection as soon as I saw it I knew.

>34 SimonW11: Lol! It can be maddening when you know the author and but the correct book just hovers tantalisingly out of reach:0)
I read Ballad of Beta 2 earlier this year and enjoyed it. Wonder if I will ever come across a generation ship which is full of healthy (both physically but even more ,mentally) people,but Beta 2 and the others in that fleet were exceptionally unlucky! :0)

>33 dustydigger:

Fantastic! A lot of my reading leans toward slipstream/interstitial, so that works out well for me. :)

>36 artturnerjr: .Well,not too far out,Art,unless you are ready to give clues!
I do know the answer to your post #27,but we'll give time for people who only come on every few days.Mustnt hog the fun!

>31 dustydigger: You got it.

Vinge writes great aliens, and Blueshell and Greenstalk in A Fire Upon the Deep are his best.
Deepness is the better of the two books IMO, and can be read independently - but it's best to read both.

True!--nervous--very very dreadfully nervous I have been and am;but why will you say that I am mad?

OK,while I was exploring for good titles for this thread,I was scoping out Iain M Banks,lost to us so sadly early,and couldnt resist adding this,written in his other Iain Banks sans ''M'' persona,and had to share it!lol
''It was the day my grandmother exploded.I sat in the crematorium,listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor,and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallenach....
Iain Banks The Crow Road

Makes Scotland seem more far out than The Culture,doesnt it? :0)

>35 dustydigger: Decline and decay do seem to be integral to generation-ship stories.

I can actually think of only one counterexample. Can't recall the title, a novelette from the 1990s (?). Interstellar travel is enabled by a drive which puts the spacecraft into a sort of pocket universe. No changes to the course are possible until the ship reaches its destination and drops back into normal space. Travel is at the speed of light, but elapsed time is the same inside and outside the spacecraft. So the duration of travel is as many years as there are light-years in the journey. Go five light years, you must endure five years in your ship, with no way to turn around.

So travel is rare. Protagonist has the job of boarding incoming vessels that reach his star and locking down the controls. Then humanitarian officers can follow and deal with whatever horrible things have happened to the crew and passengers (or their descendants) over the years or centuries of their journeys. If anyone is still alive.

Then an entire planet, hollowed out and with an immense population, arrives. As protag makes his way to the controls at the world's center, passing through numerous viable civilizations, he realizes that such a big spacecraft can be indifferent to long trips - it's self-sufficient. The entire population of his star system can move to the planet and join in a grand voyage around the galaxy.

>40 dustydigger: There's a pretty good British TV miniseries of The Crow Road, worth tracking down.

>32 dustydigger: It can be a chore to change old habits, that's for sure.

How's this for a suggested answer format:

>post #
Repeat First Line from that post.
Show answer.

I think this might be what dustydigger is leaning toward in any case.

>42 dukedom_enough:. Where do the years go? Unbelievably,it was made back in 1996. Wonder whatever happened to those actors,what were their names,Bill Paterson,and a certain Peter Capaldi?
Good series,fairly true to the book. Then of course that is one of the BBCs greatest strong points,doing excellent adaptations of all sorts of books

>44 dustydigger:

I was pleasantly surprised to see how well they handled Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

>39 dustydigger:

True!--nervous--very very dreadfully nervous I have been and am;but why will you say that I am mad?

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

>37 dustydigger:

I do know the answer to your post #27,but we'll give time for people who only come on every few days.Mustnt hog the fun!

I've got to start coming up with more obscure books - you guys are guessing them too soon!

>44 dustydigger: Iain Banks said that the tv series was "irritatingly better than the book in a number of ways"...

>47 artturnerjr: Lol. Huh,just be grateful that Mark W Tiedemann,author, and older statesman as it were of our shelfari SF group isnt here. No matter how obscure the title he seemed to know it! He moved with us from Shelfari to Leafmarks,but gave up at moving to a third home in 5 months.(see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_W._Tiedemann)
He has a great blog called Distal Muse which shows off his wide range of interests www.marktiedemann.com/wordpress/

Thomas ,Jerry,and ScoLgo,did you see that Mark had a great time at WorldCon in Kansas was giving autographs in company with Todd McCaffrey,and he took part in a panel on living on a generation starship,fellow panellists including Pat Cadigan and Jerry Pournelle. I bet that was fun. Wish he was here today for our mini,very mini take on said generation starships!

>41 dukedom_enough: Kerplop. or maybe Ker-plop. published in Asimovs I think

>50 dustydigger: Yes, did see that. Pretty cool! I have been following Mark via his Goodreads blog - which links to Distal Muse, (he and a few other authors are about the only reason I even keep my GR account any more).

>50 dustydigger: Nope, missed it all. I don't pay much attention to Worldcon these days, and now that I'm thinking about it, I haven't seen a notification from Mark's blog in a long time. I need to check what's up with that.

>46 artturnerjr: Correct.,Only good old Poe could have a person who stalks a poor old man for a week,because he thinks he has an evil eye,smothers him,dismembers him and puts him under the floor boards and conducts a teaparty with police over the body,while hearing the heart beating louder and louder claim he is merely nervous!
(Reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment I often wished Raskolnikov,who started off murdering the pawnbroker, had been a little more ''nervous'',the book would have been a lot shorter if his guilt was as keen as Poe's maniac's was! lol))

Anyone got any ideas about the titles in posts#9,19 and 20?

Ok, I haven't been very good in guessing any of the books, but I'll try my hand in posting a first line.

First line
Saving the human race is frantic business.

>19 ScoLgo: "Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head"

Not totally sure but is it Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver ?

>9 paradoxosalpha: THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, a good and interesting read

>58 bookstopshere: Thank goodness someone got it. Its been driving me nuts for days. I hadnt a clue ,and the maddening thing was that I kept thinking about that old dubbed Japanese show in the 80s,''Monkey''!

>27 artturnerjr:
''She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window.''

Richard Bachman The Running Man''

Only knew this because I had been researching SK titles for the game,and I remembered reading the book back in (mumble mumble). But it was a few years before Arne took the role in the film. As far as I remember the story was very very downbeat and depressing It was in an omnibus of Bachman books,and I disliked it so much I didnt read the rest. Never have been a great fan of King anyway,I am a wimp where horror is concerned!

>58 bookstopshere:, >59 dustydigger:

Years of Rice and Salt it is. I just snagged it a week ago for $2.50 at a friends of the public library sale.

Now,only ScoLgo's #20.
I was thinking of something like Charles Stross's virtual reality series Halting State,but thats not right. I'm stumped

>62 dustydigger: Ahum. Haven't seen a suggestion yet on >56 zjakkelien: either...

>63 zjakkelien: lol,Patience,patience. Remember its the weekend,most people are away.give it a few days.:0)

>57 SChant: Yes! Good job!

>56 zjakkelien:
that's Card, but damned if I can remember which (and I'm too lazy to look)

>60 dustydigger:

Correct! The book is very much superior to the film, as is often the case. Also very depressing and bleak, but this is not really a negative in my view, especially considering the book's subgenre (dystopian SF). If you dislike this sort of thing, you probably made the right decision in not reading any of the other novels in that omnibus, as they are just disturbing as The Running Man, if not more so.

***

I'm gonna give the "first line" thing one more shot; if you all get this one as quickly as the first two I submitted, I'm giving up for awhile!

First Line

Call them the Firstborn.

ETA: Wrong title in 1st paragraph

>66 bookstopshere: I'm already impressed that you got the author right! Don't know how everybody does this...

>20 ScoLgo: Aarrgghh! ScoLgo,hope you put us out of our misery soon. Who knows a book about gameplaying or something like that,with a character called Michael. I havent a clue.
Meanwhile,I am going to post a few more well known titles for the less well read to have a go.:0)

First Lines

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

First Lines
In the week before their departure to Arakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

First Lines

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight.

OK,its two sentences,so sue me.

>71 dustydigger: & 72: ah, you're spoiling us with a couple of easy ones to stop us giving up!

71: Dune
72: 2001: a space odyssey

> 70 Hyperion - I started reading it because of that first sentence, but the rest of the book didn't live up to it!

Two sentences.

Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl”, from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her.

> 75 The Girl with All the Gifts by Mike Carey. I really love this book.

First Line

As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.

>69 dustydigger:

Some books LTers have tagged "gaming":

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
For the Win by Cory Doctorow
Halting State by Charles Stross
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
In Real Life by Cory Doctorow

https://www.librarything.com/tag/gaming

>73 RobertDay: Correct Robert. Dont be greedy,answering two at once! lol.
I never got round to reading 2001 when it first came out.Then a couple of years ago I finally read it,and it certainly made the film a lot more comprehensible! :0) Especially the ending in the bedroom,and the starchild.
Ah the nostalgia. I was doing library studies at college in Newcastle,and getting bored with some snoringly boring essay stuff,so I popped out of the main library to a cinema in a little side street close by,not knowing what I was going to see.Still remember gawping at the screen,gobsmacked when I first went drifting through space to the Blue Danube music. The totally awesomeness of space so beautifully underlined by Also Spracht Zarathustra was amazing too......
And IMO if someone else had done the voice of Hal half of the appeal of the story would have been lost.
People may moan aboutit being style over real substance,but what style!
Dear me,in two years it will be half a century old..........

AH HA! Are we banding together to thwart ScoLgo from beating us? Unfortunately I have only read Halting State
Any of this list look possible,or familiar,folks?

>79 dustydigger:

Still my all-time favorite film. Hard to believe such an avant-garde and ambiguous movie was such a big hit. Audiences were much more open to this sort of thing in the 1960s, I think.

it is not the Cline or the Stross.

>76 SChant: Isnt it about zombies? I have never taken to the whole zombie sub-genre,too gruesome for me,I'm a wimp! Nope vampires and were wolves are as far as I go......

i dont think its a gaming story.

> Gonna say: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

ETA: checking...got it.

>83 dustydigger: Kinda - not the traditional zombies as monsters but more a dystopia. It's from the perspective of a little girl who doesn't really know what she is and why scientists are researching her and other children with the "illness".

Just noticed that there's a film being released this week - I'm definitely going to see it!.

>85 dukedom_enough: Correct!

>79 dustydigger: & >81 artturnerjr: I really enjoyed the novel and I like the film as a key milestone in cinematography for SciFi. What I really love is the parody, "Dark Star", especially the philosophical smart bomb and its thoughts.

>69 dustydigger: Regarding >20 ScoLgo:... "In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did every single night."...

You guys are getting pretty close. Say the word and I will post the book title.

Well its not Cline,Stevenson or Stross. Is it one of that list in post #78?

>90 dustydigger: Yes. It's For The Win by Cory Doctorow

>79 dustydigger: I saw that in Derby on release, though I was only ten at the time. I 'parked' the question of What It All Meant until I got around to reading the novel some six years later. It remains perhaps the most realistic SF film ever; only a perfectionist like Kubrick could have done that. The establishing shot in the centrifuge where Bowman runs round it TWICE, just to show that Kubrick could repeat that shot whenever he wanted to, is still stunning, even though I now know how it's done! A large amount of the tech in the film was built by aerospace companies, just to add verisimilitude.

I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. On one occasion, we had an outdoor screening at Compton Verney, a stately home turned into an art gallery by one of the Littlewood family; just as the shuttle was landing at Clavius, the Moon poked out from behind a cloud bank! Perfect! And on the 40th anniversary re-release, we went to see it at the Birmingham Imax. For a forty-year-old film, it was remarkable to see it blown up to seven stories high and for there to be only one shot that didn't work (again, then the shuttle approaching the Moon; at that size it was obvious that the Moon image was a flat photograph). Every other shot was flawless and indistinguishable from reality. By comparison, more recent films like 'Apollo 13', though wonderful for CGI in their day - which wasn't that long ago - now look quite obvious when watched on Blu-Ray on a high-definition screen. Ultimately, there's only one way to do convincing special effects, and that's with REAL objects. Again, look at the spaceship effects in Star Trek 2 and compare them to something like, oh, 'Avatar'.

I suspect you were reading librarianship at Newcastle a bit before I was - the big film I went to see whilst I was at college was the first 'Star Wars' - again, real model work and I don't find the re-engineered CGI version so engaging. Sadly, my mind map of the centre of Newcastle is now very rusty as I've not been back for quite a few years. And I doubt I could remember the names of too many of the lecturers, apart from I.S. Simpson, and that's only because I've been using his Basic statistics for librarians ever since because it's perfect for initiating the bewildered in that discipline.

>88 pgmcc: So very few people now know 'Dark Star' as it never gets shown on tv any more. The dialogue still cuts us up and we often find ourselves quoting apposite bits of it from time to time. All that and an ending based on a Ray Bradbury short story too!

>79 dustydigger: >92 RobertDay:. I recently re-watched 2001 and you are so right. It holds up incredibly well. I too originally saw the film in theaters upon release. I was probably 9 or 10 years old at the time and had very little clue what I had just watched. All I knew was, it was the coolest thing ever! A few years later, I read the book and was finally enlightened.

First Line

The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it.

First Line

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.

>95 ScoLgo:
got to recognize LORD OF LIGHT anywhere
94 can wait for younger readers

>94 ScoLgo:

Hm. River of Gods starts with a face-down corpse, but it's in a stream, not snow.

>95 ScoLgo:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god.

Ah dear old Sam,one of Zelazny's trickster characters! Oddly enough it has only now dawned,better late than never,how much this book was influenced by the times it was written.The Beatles were in their eastern guru stage! lol
At the time this blend of SF and fantasy seemed really strange and mysterious to me,and I loved it,but I havent reread it since the early 80s,dont know how well it would hold up now.I reread This Immortal last year,and found it held up very well,albeit with classical greek mythology as a base. I have a soft spot for those tickster type of characters,like Sam and Prince Corwin in the Amber series.Wonder what Zelazny could have done with Loki,the real avatar of the Trickster? Now that could have been intriguing,a nice companion piece with Gaiman's American Gods! lol.Hang on a minute,like Loki,Corwin was imprisoned and blinded too,a neat little parallel that never crossed my mind before!
Ah,the nostalgia! My little town's science fiction section was made up of six shelves of rather ancient editions of the 50s greats,but for some reason the library did get Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions which introduced me to Chip Delany,and the like,and also Zelazny's brilliant A Rose for Ecclesiastes and some others of his stories,cant for the life of me remember what the anthology title was.But then I got a job in the city library.What a year 1968 was as far as my reading went. Lord of the Rings,Dune,Zelazny,Bradbury,Jane Gaskell's Atlan. I was working in the city public library by then,and could snaffle books at will before the public got their mitts on them. Perks of the job :0) . I regularly staggered home with large piles of books in my hands.......

Talking about Nine Princes in Amber,which Martin cited as a major influence on Game of Thrones,The Walking Dead people announced in July that they intend to adapt the Amber Chronicles for TV,and are looking for a writer for the series.

94> Ancillary Justice?

>95 ScoLgo: Lord of Light

>88 pgmcc: smart? .....hmm...

Doolittle : ''Bomb! You are NOT to detonate the bomb bay!
I repeat,you are NOT to detonate the bomb bay.''

So guess what Bomb#20 does.
Makes our HAL look completely rational and sane,doesnt it?

>102 dustydigger: Let there be light!

>94 ScoLgo: I agree with >100 SimonW11: on this; Ancillary Justice.

>98 dustydigger: Best bag I ever got first dibs on through working in a library was the UK 1st hardback edition of Dune. At the time, Gollancz were still putting out their sf in the traditional yellow jacket. For Dune, they went to a full-size hardback instead of the A-format size, and gave it a beautiful black cover with a stylised dune pattern in white. It was beautiful and l've never seen another copy. A quick look online shows me a copy of this on sale at £1250. Sigh.

http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/authors/frank-herbert/

>88 pgmcc: >92 RobertDay:

"Make a wish."
...but we're not doing endings.

>96 bookstopshere: Yep. Figured I'd better toss an easier one on the pile... ;)

Yep, you got it. Nice!

>56 zjakkelien: >66 bookstopshere: >68 zjakkelien:

"Saving the human race is frantic business."

I haven't seen an answer to this one. It's not an OSC book I have read, I don't think...?

>88 pgmcc: ff.

You can stream Dark Star for free on AMC's website:

http://www.amc.com/video-extras/dark-star

>92 RobertDay:

The special effects in that film still look amazing.They don't even register as special effects - it's more like you're watching a documentary or something.

>110 artturnerjr: There's a story that when the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov saw '2001' he told Clarke, "Now I feel as though I've been in space twice."

First Lines

'What's it going to be then, eh?'

Here's one, new book, but I think it's an easy guess (even I could guess it!):

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

>113 LauraM77: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.

Haven't read it yet - but I read the first paragraph before placing the book on my TBR shelf a couple of months ago.

>112 dustydigger: "What's it going to be then, eh?"

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

>109 ScoLgo: Should I start giving hints? Every chapter of this books starts with part of the story at the earliest time in the line of events. Let me give you the full one for the first chapter:

First lines
Saving the human race is a frantic business. Or a tedious one. It all depends on what stage the process you're taking part in.

And in spoilerfont the first sentence of the actual story:
Rigg and Father usually set the traps together, because it was Rigg who had the knack of seeing the paths that the animals they wanted were still using.

Correct,ScoLgo. I picked this title because of the Kubrick connection. Hard to believe the same ma created these two films,2001 and Clockwork Orange!Well,the beautiful music is common to both,but with decidedly different results!
I wasnt keen on the film because the ending ignored Ballard's final ironic chapter where Alex actually grew out of the violence. I used to fervently say to myself when my teenagers (though not violent I hasten to add!) were being particularly obsterperous,''all things pass,even Alex grew out of it!'' lol.
I devoured the book way back when it exploded on the world,,around 1963?,at a time when ''juvenile delinquents'' and ''teenagers'' seemed to be synonyms in the media,and I adored it . My friends and I adopted even some of the nadsat slang from the book for a while.The wit and dark humour took our fancy,but on seeing the film I was very uncomfortable with the actual visuals of the violence,which Kubrick hammered the shellshocked audience with.I had a similar reaction years later with the Dexter series. I remember snorting with laughter on a packed bus at some gruesome but hilarious statements by serial killer Dexter in Jeff Lyndsay's brilliant Darkly Dreaming Dexter ,but when I saw the TV series I found it extremely difficult to take,and gave up both books and TV series.

>114 ScoLgo: Correct! Seveneves it is. Big book, but worth the effort. The most spectacular apocalypse ever. They should make a movie after this one, there are some images there worth putting on screen.

First Lines

The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.

First Lines

Both moons were high, dimming the light of all but the brightest stars.

>119 dustydigger: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

>120 dustydigger:
Guy Gavriel Kay's TIGANA

First Line

This year the Ribeiro's daffodils seeded early and they seeded cockroaches.

First Line

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

>121 SChant: Correct. This was the first Gaiman I ever read,and is still my favourite.Twentieth anniversary of its publication,and of the brilliant TV series.This was how I got into reading urban fantasy. I just loved London Below,and all the weird characters.The Marquis of Carabos was great,and Mr Croup and Mr Vandemaar were funny but terrifying. Hywell Bennet as Mr Croup was brilliant in the TV series. Had some of the best lines too

(answering phone) -'Mr. Croup: ''Croup and Vandemar, the Old Firm, obstacles obliterated, nuisances eradicated, bothersome limbs removed and tutelary dentistry undertaken.''
........................................
Mr. Croup: If you cut us, do we not bleed?

Mr. Vandemaar: (pondering) No.
......................................

Mr. Croup: What do you want?

The Marquis De Carabas: What does anybody want?

Mr. Vandemaar: Dead things... extra teeth
.......................................

“Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional.”
.......................................

“Mr. Croup began to laugh. It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.”

>122 bookstopshere: Correct. Thats the only GGK book I've read. It was OK,and someday I intend to get round to The Fionavar Tapestry. Is it just me,but these books sound as if they are YA. But then I find a lot of fantasy seems that way to me!

>126 dustydigger:, that's an interesting response to GGK in particular. I find he hits a lot of adult-oriented themes, perhaps you need to try something he's written more recently that is more closely tied to Earth history. Sailing to Sarantium (Byzantium) or The Lions of Al-Rassan (Spain) would probably be far better choices for you than Fionavar (sheer fantasy) or Ysabel (YA hero).

>125 dustydigger: Very tempted to add that speech ending "We are utterly professional" to my CV. :-)

FIRST LINE:

"No good!" said Lamont, sharply. "I didn't get anywhere!"

>129 ThomasWatson: I know this,but will give someone else a chance.Ignore my brooding look.......

First Lines

My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male.

>126 dustydigger: >127 Cecrow: The only GGK book I have read is Under Heaven. I thought it was rather magnificent. Set in China during the Tang Dynasty, it is not standard-trope fantasy. Though there are fantastical elements, it mostly reads like historical fiction. Beautifully written. Every time I think about it, I recall that I need to read more GGK soon!

>131 dustydigger: - Bit of a cheat - that's a last line! ;-) (Unless it's a trick question...)

>133 RobertDay: Oops,I'll do another title instead. I have a list of final sentences must have got mixed up.
So people #131 post is a replacement title,and a nice easy one.

>131 dustydigger:

First Lines

My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl, which I have not read beyond the first page or two - that's a distinctive first line!

>129 ThomasWatson:
First Lines

"No good!" said Lamont, sharply. "I didn't get anywhere!"

Isaac Asimov The Gods Themselves

I had a hard time at first getting into that book,it wasnt the easiest of styles,but it was very interesting once I grasped what was going on! :0)

The title is from Schiller,''Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain''

>135 artturnerjr: Correct,Art. It was a taut intense book somewhat sad at times.. Lots of psychology,which seemed the norm in so much 50s SF,but that idea of a huge cavern full of spaceships preprogrammmed to go out into the unknown either to return with riches or never to come back was a gripping premise. I didnt feel that the later books in the series lived up to the first tale.

>124 ScoLgo:
Aarrgghh! I am going nuts about this first sentence. I know its about a woman who wants to be a spaceship pilot,and I know its by a woman author but thats it. For some unknown reason I keep thinking of Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman,though I know its not that,this is a much later book. I intend to do a reread of Mitchison next year,it was well ahead of its time with a female spacer and some weird sex! lol I'm sure she would have have got on well with Miles Vorkosigan's mother Cordelia,who also was an explorer,spacer and someone who as a Betan was very tolerant of sex! :0)

Sorry but I havent got a clue about #123 about cockroaches....(shudder).....

>137 dustydigger:

Hurray! I'm always intending to get around to reading Pohl's novels and never quite manage to squeeze them in. The short fiction of his that I've read is quite impressive - I recently reread his "Day Million" and, if anything, liked it even better than the first time I've read it. His frequent collaborator C.M. Kornbluth (The Marching Morons, etc.) was quite good, too - I'm sure that they blew more than a few minds back in the day.

>139 artturnerjr: I am always meaning to reread Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants which blew me away as a teen. I loved the snarky take on consumerism and ad agencies.I'll bet it is still relevant today. Plus ca change etc.Yep,it surely blew my mind way back in the mid sixties! :0)
The novel is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded source for a number of new words, including "soyaburger", "moon suit", "tri-di" for "three-dimensional", "R and D" for "research and development", "sucker-trap" for a shop aimed at gullible tourists, and one of the first uses of "muzak" as a generic term. It is also cited as the first incidence of "survey" as a verb meaning to carry out a poll! lol
Havent read The Marching Morons,will keep an eye out for it.
Oh dear,next year's TBR is already growing rather long.........

>138 dustydigger: You are very close, Dusty! Female character wanting to be a spaceship pilot = yes. Female author = yes. Hint: I find that first sentence exceedingly brilliant because the first thought that likely enters the reader's head is a romantic notion of giving up one's heart for love. In this instance, we quickly find out that she is literally having her heart removed from her body because one cannot survive FTL travel while awake unless your heart has been surgically replaced with a mechanical substitute. So, to be a pilot, you must give up your heart in a very literal sense - which she does quite willingly.

>140 dustydigger: I actually re-read 'The Space Merchants' online this year; I was blocked from doing my job, waiting for a problem to be fixed before getting a new version of the project software to test, and one of the perks of being in IT is that no-one looks at your Net traffic (!). So I found an online copy of 'The Space Merchants' and I finished it in one afternoon! (I am a pretty fast reader, to be fair.) It still stood up remarkably well and I would say it's one of the few novels of that period that actually has relevance today.

>140 dustydigger:

The Space Merchants was recently included as part of the Library of America's American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, so I guess it's officially part of the literary canon now. Entertainment Weekly described it as "a precursor to everything Mad Men addresses about the ad business—just set in the future, and on various planets"; sounds like something that would indeed speak to modern audiences.

The Marching Morons was one of the most interesting SF tales I've read this year. The idea behind it is very similar to the film Idiocracy, if you're familiar with that one. It's widely available for free online* if you can't get your hands on a print copy. It's often referred to as a novella, but it only runs about 30 pp. in the print edition I have of it - closer to a longish short story, I'd say. Let me know if you get a chance to read it - I'd be very interested in hearing you thoughts on it.

Oh dear,next year's TBR is already growing rather long.........

Tell me about it. I've been trying to narrow mine down to 24 "must-read" books - sweating bullets!

*e.g., at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233

I do a yearly 12x12 challenge,(read 12 books from each of 12 categories),and most of my 48 SF/F slots are already.
Category 1: 12 Hugo and Nebula winners
Category 2: 12 Defining Books of the Nineties
Category 3 : 12 Pre 1960s SF/Morwennas list
Category 4 : 12 books for WWEnd challenges
I also have a UF category,plus a YA one,so that makes my SF/F genre reading about half of my reads. The rest are junior fiction and crime,plus a spare category for other books.
Normally I read about 200 books a year,but this last year has been manic with real life crises,and I still have 30 books left to read for my 12x12.But yep I am happily sorting next years reads already. Categories 1-3 are already almost complete,as are my vintage crime and junioe fiction slots. I do love my lists! :0)

>136 dustydigger: Correct on all counts.

ScoLgo,we need answers to posts 123 and 124.
and zjakkelien #116 seems to have stumped everyone.

First Lines

''The wind came across the bay like something living.''

>146 dustydigger: All-righty...

>123 ScoLgo: The book is Mirabile by Janet Kagan
>124 ScoLgo: The book is Superluminal by Vonda N. McIntyre

149 > Wouldnt have known either of these books! :0)
Sorry,been away from the group for the best part of a week with an infection.spent much of the time in bed,not online:0( And now my sister is in hospital :0(. Hope to get back to normal next week
The whole group seems to have been very quiet!

> 147
No one guessed the First Line? Better give a clue.
First Lines

''The wind came across the bay like something living.''

Imagine I am a like a god(!). I take a planetary sphere and flatten it from above and below to produce a very pronounced oblate shape. The equater has a gravity of 3Gs,but the poles have 700gravities, Earthmen have lost a probe with valuable geological data right near the pole,and need local inhabitants ,who look rather like caterpillars, to bring the probe down to the equator for collection.
One of the most famous SF merges of hard science with thrilling adventures and likable characters.

>150 dustydigger: Mission of Gravity?

>150 dustydigger: Ah, your illness must still be affecting your judgement. Your clue was too good: I would have got the same answer from that description, and I've never even read the book!

>151 iansales: Correct Ian.
Sheesh,you caught me before I signed off! lol.
Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a personal favourite of mine,though I was a bit disappointed in the followup, Starlight
But I loved the intrepid Captain Barlennan,who always keeps his cool! :0)

>152 RobertDay: well I thought I better make it easy since you all seemed even more comatose than me.
Hope you try the book sometime!

Talking about comatose,I have been rendered so by a very very boring goalless football match where England were pathetic. Mr Dusty has spent the last couple of hours calling them rotten which detracted from me trying to read the start of Iani M Banks Use of Weapons Its looking good fun,and a lot less effort that the mindboggling Sword of the Lictor
Mind you,I was certainly wakened up with the news bulletin that followed the match, at the latest implosion of a US presidential candidate. Nuff said,but it all has a morbid sort of fascinartion for outsiders!.Looks like a long long few weeks ahead for the USA! :0)

Darn it,I think the meds are def. affecting my discetion and jugement after all,Robert. Hope this post doesnt get flagged! ;0)

>155 dustydigger: There are those who consider 'Use of Weapons' to be a difficult read.....

>156 RobertDay: True ,Robert,it is a bit enigmatic at times,keeping me on my toes working out the timelines.Varies from humour to horror at the turn of a page at times :0)
I am loving Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep of which I have read 112/ 578 pages,and it took quite a while to grasp what on earth was going on,also understanding the zones etc. Great fun though,and its all keeping my mind active,which cant be bad,and is FINALLY making some sort of sense.
Challenging but fun!

>157 dustydigger: 'A Fire upon the Deep' taught me the phrase "The Net of a Thousand Lies"; for such an early novel in the life-cycle of t'Internet, Vinge got that pretty well right....

>158 RobertDay:, except that it probably exceeded 1,000 in its first year.