The Lyttle Lytton Contest
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"The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed." - (Steven King, 1982 "The Gunslinger") [1]
1: https://litreactor.com/columns/the-top-10-best-opening-lines...
The man in Black ambulated with passion across the Desert, and the Gunslinger said I'm gonna do that too.
The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. There was talk of trying to track down a mysterious man who, if not a gun, could be a helpful ally. For a moment, the two could not be sure. The Man in Black was not the same man they had met at the end of the night. But he could be a friend.
As the Man went through the desert and into the darkness of the unknown, he left the gunslinger behind. The gunslinger was in the middle of a trail of shattered bricks. The Man went away.
"Man in Black," said the Gunslinger.
"Gunslinger," said the Man in Black.
Bother 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.
From "A Canticle for Liebowitz"
"Brother Gerard of Utah", "might never have discovered", "blessed" paired with the humorously cold and vague "documents", "girded loins" (just inherently funny, not exactly bad), "that" being just far enough removed from its referent that it reads awkwardly.
This all happens in part because (I'm pretty sure) it is supposed to read as kinda funny, because it's leaning into often-groan-worthy sci-fi tropes ("of Utah") but just happens to be one of the rare good books that does that, and because it is just a little less tightly-written than it might be. The combo's pretty amusing, but also too good for the contest.
The sky over the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
From "Neuromancer", by William Gibson.
"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."
"That branch of the Lake of Como, which turns toward the south between two unbroken chains of mountains, presenting to the eye a succession of bays and gulfs, formed by their jutting and retiring ridges, suddenly contracts itself between a headland to the right and an extended sloping bank on the left, and assumes the flow and appearance of a river."
That's the beginning of "I Promessi Sposi" (The Bethrothed) which is one of the most important books of italian literature, and IMO has one of the worst incipits ever written.
And I feel the 1834 english version[0] is actually more readable than the original.
[0] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35155/35155-h/35155-h.htm
"The spring rains had softened the ground, so Dunk had no trouble digging the grave."
Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Outrageous Okona” shooting script adapted by Harper Cole
Someone obviously has a different idea of TNG than Gene Roddenberry.
Edit: Link http://adamcadre.ac/18lyttle.html
It was a dark and stormy night. The rain plastered the cheap dress enticingly to my thigh as I bent to peel the still-warm gum from the sidewalk."
"Obama chuckled. “You mean the Chaos Emeralds?”"
"He was a dork, and Stormy Knight suddenly shot the ring right out of his fingers, because she was tired of dorks, especially the kind of dork who automatically assumed that she'd marry him, even though he was a dork and she was the kind of girl who could shoot the ring out of a man's hand, hitting nothing but the ring and maybe a few miscellaneous bits of fingertip."
(Playing with the "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out" trope...)
Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.
Which, yes, is deliberate parody.
https://www.tor.com/2011/04/01/the-shadow-war-of-the-night-d...
Update: It's at least "interesting" if not fun; here's a story generated from the 2019 winner using the GPT-2's medium sized model
Is it me or have titles on HN been changing a lot more frequently than they used to, in the last few weeks?
"The beet is the most intense of vegetables."
From Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.
"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
From The Crow Road by Iain Banks
You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? - To Have and Have Not
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - The Old Man and the Sea
Then there was the bad weather. - A Moveable Feast
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plains to the mountains. - A Farewell to Arms
Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. - Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises
Each one of those opening sentences asks more questions.
Is that really what it was like in Havana? Why hasn't he caught fish for so long? Where was the weather bad? Which river, plains and mountains? Why did his boxing career stop at Princeton?
I do enjoy Hemingway, but especially I find his opening lines compelling.
"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."
~ The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605571h.html
This one got me, “The shadowy figure stood alone in the rain on the street corner under the dim yellow streetlight, casting a long thin shadow down the alley perpendicular to him.”
Perpendicular?
From the master of bad sentences himself, Dan Brown.
https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
I found it quite enlightening to see some of the thought that goes into an opening sentence.