science fiction's opening lines

in praise of whiplash

We will open with admitting that this is a bit of a low effort email. I ate something (french fries) in quantities (many) that were ninety nine percent likely to make me ill and what do you know—I did in fact get ill. When I was eating the french fries this possibility, making myself sick, occurred to me. It felt at the time unimportant. I was like, is the future even real? Yes. Anyway. My doctor at Mt. Sinai told me once it takes the pancreas time to recover from “the insult,” a term that I assume has some technical significance but which I’ve treasured ever since. The insult.¹

Opening lines. I was thinking about them because my next column for The Point will be about Vonda McIntyre’s “Aztecs” (1977) which has one of my favorite switch-ups:

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation.…

But also, as I’ve mentioned before (here), Joanna Russ’s signature writing trick is her abrupt and often disorienting opening lines. She wants you to start this story feeling somehow already behind; it’s an “as you know…” addressed to you, a person who doesn’t and couldn’t know. It’s not the only way she opens a story (the opening line of The Female Man is the relatively straightforward “I was born on a farm in Whileaway”) but it’s very common. From The Two of Them (1978):

Here they are. They’re entirely in black, with belted tabards over something like long underwear that make them look like the cards in Alice, though nobody here has heard about that.

Who’s they? Where’s here? And so on.

With any writer who achieves crossover status, which Russ has, it’s tempting to look at their virtues as somehow alien to their context. It’s not science fiction, it’s “Litrachoor” (to use Russ’s derisive coinage in the Khatru symposium). And Russ, because of her feminism, her difficulty, and her pedigree (i.e. studying with Nabokov), is prone to being shifted over to Litrachoor whether she wants to be or not.

But while I would not claim that this type of opening line was “invented” by genre writers, it’s a technique you can find in many such stories. You can chalk some of this up to the way science fiction in particular grew through the pulps (or did in America, anyway). A good first line is an asset in a magazine. But I also think it has something to do with the audience’s built-up tolerance, indeed expectation, for feeling lost and learning how things work in a new context. So the more SFF I read, the more I view Russ’s opening lines as pushing a known “opening move” to an extreme.

Here are some older examples. This one is not science fiction but we’ll start with it anyway… H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” (1927):

You needn’t think I’m crazy, Eliot—plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don’t you laugh at Oliver’s grandfather, who won’t ride in a motor? If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We’d have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we’d taken the car.

C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s very creepy “Mimsy Were The Borogoves” (1943):

There’s no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn’t on Earth, technically speaking.

Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies—” (1959):

2217 Time Zone V (set) 7 Nov 1970 NYC—“Pop’s Place”: I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10.17 p.m. zone five or eastern time November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time & date; we must.

The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, immature features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy.

Cordwainer Smith, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964):

You already know the end—the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C’mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D’joan.

James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1974):

Listen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT&T on twenty-point margin and you think you’re Evel Knievel. AT&T? You doubleknit dummy, how I’d love to show you something.

And then, to jump forward past The Two of Them, you have Cameron Reed’s The Fortunate Fall (1996):

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know. I suppose I can’t complain. I knew the risks when I became a camera.

Sometimes these openings are disorienting because you can’t exactly tell the position of the person who is talking to you. Who (for instance) is this mediator in “Mimsy Were The Borogoves” who has already decided it’s “no use” describing something to you? Why can this person grasp both contexts? More than one Tiptree story is narrated by a person whose identity is unclear, someone who knows everything and yet isn’t really involved. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” wrongfoots you multiple times, mostly in the second paragraph. The Unmarried Mother is a man. The narrator seems to be meeting him but also already knows him. The way in which all these statements can be true is what you learn as the story goes on.

The Fortunate Fall and the Cordwainer Smith story operate another way: the openings are aimed at an audience in mind that is clearly not you or anybody you know. It is a future audience with an entire knowledge base and history that you don’t share. Throughout Reed’s text she exploits not only what you don’t know but also what you think you’ve put together, which sometimes feels like you’re reading a joke with an elaborately delayed punchline.² The narrator of The Fortunate Fall in fact tells you in the book’s opening pages what events will be significant in uncovering the book’s secrets (“the argument over Moby-Dick the night before; to the first time Voskresenye said the word, in the café on Nevsky Prospect”), but also tells you that these events won’t answer your real questions:

I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

Many of these stories are designed to be read at least twice, one time understanding nothing and the second time understanding something. The opening lines can never be as disorienting as they were the first time but they become charged with the knowledge you now possess, because the stories are enriched by knowing what’s coming instead of being deflated. For comparison one can look at the kind of science fiction that is all about the twist ending: “To Serve Man,” “The Star,” and so on. These stories are memorable—but once you know the ending you may not feel any need to reread them.

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Another approach to disorienting and then orienting the reader can be seen in the opening of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Samuel Delany has a lengthy critique of The Dispossessed (“To Read The Dispossessed,” collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw) in which he discusses, among other subjects, how much he doesn’t like this paragraph. (He really does not like it.) Delany thinks that the superior, more science fiction–true version of this opening would go more like this:

There was a wall of roughly mortared, uncut rocks. An adult could look over it; a child could climb it. Where the road ran through, it had no gate. But for seven generations it had been the most important thing in that world.

I find “To Read The Dispossessed” an interesting but unconvincing essay; it’s worth reading to think about the opposed ways in which Le Guin and Delany approach creating art, but his problems with the book as such don’t land that well for me. (More on that some other time.) However, the difference between Le Guin’s opening and Delany’s is also instructive when it comes to thinking about disorientation. Le Guin’s narrative voice is talking to us. One of Delany’s issues with the opening is that it’s unclear to whom the wall could possibly appear unimportant. The answer is: us. It wouldn’t look important to us. So the opening of The Dispossessed is how Le Guin makes it clear she is telling us a story, as if there’s an invisible “once upon a time” before “there was a wall.”

Similarly, Delany does not like Le Guin’s use of phrases like “even a child” but if you read the two passages out loud side by side you can see how the language is again putting the reader into the mental place to be told a story. It’s not that different from the way Tiptree sometimes uses the real but anonymous narrator in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” or “The Only Neat Thing To Do” except that Le Guin’s narrative voice in The Dispossessed never directly addresses you and also isn’t insane.

Delany’s opening on the other hand doesn’t really try to disorient you. That’s not what he wants to use it to do. In fact, he wants to orient you. One reason he’s not in the litany of openings above is because I’m not sure he really goes for this technique that much. Ironically I think this is part of why I often have to start his novels a few times before I really begin to lock into them—I enjoy this feeling of being kicked off into the deep end, but he refuses to indulge me… most of the time.

1. Also Ocean Waves might be a day late, we’ll see.

2. The “Post police,” mentioned in that first sentence, are referred to with fear… but eventually you find out the meaning of that name, during what is an otherwise very tense moment, and it is funny in a kind of hysterical, relieving-the-tension sort of way.