Okay, George R. R. Martin doesn’t need any more publicity (have you seen the Amazon SF&F Top 100 list? Approx. half come from A Song of Ice and Fire series!), but I thought it might make an interesting exercise to take a peek at Martin’s opening gambit to a postitively gargantuan edifice of imaginative fiction . . .

“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”

“Do they frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

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French writer Aliette de Bodard is up this week with the first novel in her “Obsidian and Blood” trilogy, Servant of the Underworld, which is set in an ancient Aztec world suffused with magic. Let’s take a look at the opening:

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips–preparing him for the long journey ahead.

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Up this week is Alistair Reynolds’ debut novel, Revelation Space, which was published way back in the year 2000. Wow, I really should get round to reading this. Let’s see how enticing the first few lines are . . .

Mantell Sector, North Nekhebet, Resurgam, Delta Pavonis system, 2551

There was a razorstorm coming in.

Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night. The archaelogical dig was an array of deep square shafts separated by baulks of sheer-sided soil: the classical Wheeler box-grid.

Well, anybody who’s reading these lines probably already knows that Revelation Space is a classic hard-sf space-opera–the cover is suitably moody and dark and depicts an elaborate spacecraft passing a crescent-illuminated planet or moon–but nevertheless I do still like the space-and-time focusing first line. It gives an immediate sense of the scale at play (I’m assuming we’re doing a zoom-in rather than a zoom-out–from light years to light minutes in eight breathless words) and tells us this story is going to take place over a big canvas. The year 2551 is a bold statement that Reynolds means business. I mean, setting the action five hundred years into the future raises my expectations a lot. I want to see novel technologies, a transformed ideological/political landscape, and weird bifurcations of humanity. Any hint of a rehash of terrestrial colonialism set to the backdrop of space is going to be seriously disappointing.

So, onto the first line proper: “There was a razorstorm coming in.” I’ve seen the “there was” construction derided in some circles as weak writing, but as I’ve mentioned before, I think it carries a certain power. Obviously the most interesting part of this sentence is the invented noun “razorstorm”, which certainly manages to trounce the notion that you mustn’t talk about the weather straight away. In fact, I imagine the advice about not starting with a weather report (It was a dark and stormy night . . .) precisely came about because it was such an effective device for an opening that it soon got overused and became cliche. Here the line not only gives us scary, unique weather, but also gives us momentum, an impelling motion that gets the narrative engine turning–the razorstorm is coming in. Good stuff.

Then we get character identification: Sylveste. A name that is nicely balanced between familiarity and strangeness (warning bells might’ve started sounding if our protag was called Bob or Sdkljd’G*gehd–personally, maybe because I’m more a “visual” reader than an “aural” one, unpronounable names never bother me so much, but it’s never a good idea to alienante a good proportion of your readership because they can’t say your heroes’ name). We get a nice subliminal hint that Sylveste is perhaps something of an outsider, or at least not a conservative stickler, from him standing on the “edge”, but equally that he is not a workshy layabout from the mention of his labours. Nothing spectacular, but solid character traits for a POV the reader can get behind.

The next line is a fairly dry, technical description of the dig, which gives us a clear picture of the scene, and perhaps a little more insight into the orderly-mind of Sylveste. In terms of the “rules of writing” it’s a good example of the fact that there is no line between description and character. Everything that comes to the reader, every single word, comes through the filter of a character’s viewpoint; there aren’t plot bits and then character bits and then setting bits–it’s all one glorious melange of motive and sensation binded by language. It’s what makes fiction writing so bloody hard.

So, what do we have? A person in a place with a problem. An opening as solid as the Queen’s Gambit in chess. Classic.

Lauren Beukes’ Clarke Award winning novel, Zoo City, is the focus of this week’s first line Friday. Blending the bleeding edge with street-smart characters and weird realities, Beukes writes 21st century fiction with a social conscience. She’s also a master of the Gibsonian trait of slamming you right into the action whether you’re buckled up or not . . .

In Zoo City, it’s impolite to ask.

Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg’s skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains.

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Iain Banks, the talented bastard, published this, his first Culture novel in 1987. He was thirty-three. And it was his fourth published book! Consider Phlebas was my first introduction to the Culture, and Banks begins the book in typical spectacular fashion:

The ship didn’t even have a name. It had no human crew because the factory craft which contructed it had been evacuated long ago. It had no life-support or accomodation units for the same reason. It had no class number or fleet designation because it was a mongrel made from bits and pieces of different types of warcarft; and it didn’t have a name because the factory craft had no time left for such niceties.

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