# books

author: John Scalzi
title: Redshirts
first_sentence:
From the top of the large boulder he sat on, Ensign Tom Davis looked across the expanse of the cave, toward Captain Lucius Abernathy, Science Officer Q’eeng and Chief Engineer Paul West perched on a second, larger boulder, and thought, Well, this sucks.


author: Connie Willis
title: Blackout, All Clear (Vol. 2 - Blackout)
first_sentence:
By noon Michael and Merope still hadn’t returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.


author: Michael Chabon
title: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
first_sentence:
Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.


author: Vernor Vinge
title: Rainbows End
first_sentence:
The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense Against Disease.


author: Robert Charles Wilson
title: Spin
first_sentence:
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out.


author: Lois McMaster Bujold
title: Paladin of Souls
first_sentence:
Sta leaned forward between the crenellations atop the gate tower, the stone gritty beneath her pale hands, and watched in numb exhaustion as the final mourning party cleared the castle gate below.


author: J. K. Rowling
title: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
first_sentence:
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.


author: Neal Stephenson
title: The Diamond Age
first_sentence:
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.


author: Lois McMaster Bujold
title: Mirror Dance
first_sentence:
The row of comconsole booths lining the passenger concourse of Escobar's largest commercial orbital transfer station had mirrored doors, divided into diagonal sections by rainbow-colored lines of lights.


author: Kim Stanley Robinson
title: Green Mars
first_sentence:
The point is not to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.


author: Dan Simmons
title: Hyperion
first_sentence:
The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat, and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring.


author: C. J. Cherryh
title: Cyteen
first_sentence:
It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar.


author: David Brin
title: The Uplift War
first_sentence:
There had never been such traffic at Port Helenia’s sleepy landing field—not in all the years Fiben Bolger had lived here.


author: Orson Scott Card
title: Ender's Game
first_sentence:
The monitor lady smiled very nicely and tousled his hair and said, “Andrew, I suppose by now you’re just absolutely sick of having that horrid monitor.


author: Isaac Asimov
title: Foundation's Edge
first_sentence:
“I don’t believe it, of course,” said Golan Trevize, standing on the wide steps of Seldon Hall and looking out over the city as it sparkled in the sunlight.


author: C. J. Cherryh
title: Downbelow Station
first_sentence:
The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space.


author: Joan D. Vinge
title: The Snow Queen
first_sentence:
Here on Tiamat, where there is more water than land, the sharp edge between ocean and sky is blurred; the two merge into one.


author: Kate Wilhelm
title: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
first_sentence:
What David always hated most about the Sumner family dinners was the way everyone talked about him as if he were not there.


author: Philip Jose Farmer
title: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
first_sentence:
All those who ever lived on Earth have found themselves resurrected--healthy, young, and naked as newborns--on the grassy banks of a mighty river, in a world unknown.


author: Larry Niven
title: Ringworld
first_sentence:
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.


author: Ursula K. Le Guin
title: The Left Hand of Darkness
first_sentence:
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.


author: Roger Zelazny
title: Lord of Light
first_sentence:
It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so.


author: Robert A. Heinlein
title: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
first_sentence:
I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.


author: Frank Herbert
title: Dune
first_sentence:
In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.


author: Fritz Leiber
title: The Wanderer
first_sentence:
Some stories of terror and the supernormal start with a moonlit face at a diamond-paned window, or an old document in spidery handwriting, or the baying of a hound across lonely moors.


author: Walter M. Miller Jr.
title: A Canticle for Leibowitz
first_sentence:
Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.


author: Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
title: They'd Rather Be Right
first_sentence:
Just ahead, on Third Street, the massive facade of San Francisco's Southern Pacific depot loomed, half hidden in the swirling fog and January twilight.


author: Isaac Asimov
title: The Mule
first_sentence:
Bel Riose traveled without escort, which is not what court etiquette prescribes for the head of a fleet stationed in a yet-sullen stellar system on the Marches of the Galactic Empire.


