(Untitled)

[elethiomel]

Like most people I'm sure, I often re-read books I particularly loved. Just lately I felt a real need to re-read William Gibson's sprawl trilogy. In doing so I rediscovered how absolutely fantastic the opening sequence of Count Zero is.

I reproduce it here in full:

Comments

[leathellin]

I have several openings I like, some of them are very famous. This one I like because it sets a slightly silly but kind of familiar scene for something incongruous and nasty to happen. The rest of the book doesn't get much more serious though (well a bit

[lathany]

That's got to be one of her faster starts! Although, credit to her, she doesn't drag the plot like some do.

[bateleur]

Some years ago lathany and I did an experiment where we both independently ranked the openings of ten books in our collection and compared the resulting rankings.

Notable results:

* Most books, even good books, have terrible openings.
* There was a lot of correlation between out rankings.
* Count Zero was one of the books. It came top.

'Nuff said.

[lathany]

Wot he said.

[malakite]

My favourite opening chapter thus far has to be the prologue to Order 66. It's written from the perspective of one of the characters who used to be a Jedi but left the Order, and deals with perspectives. The second line really grabs me - "We should all see ourselves from a strangers perspective at least once in our lives."

You can read the prologue here - http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/display.pperl?isbn=9780345506184&view=excerpt . The actual dialogue starts on page 17.

[vierkilau]

my favourite begining is to the dark tower series by stephen king because it offers so many questions that you want to ask 'the man in black ran across the desert and the gunslinger followed' there is another reason but it'd spoil the series