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Guess These Famous Science Fiction Novels By Their First Lines

I really enjoyed the recent Book Riot post Guess These Famous Novels By Their Second Lines. As an SF fan, it made me wonder about famous second lines in speculative fiction. And first lines.

Some searches revealed many posts of famous first lines in SF, but as I browsed I noticed many of my favorite first sentences from SF novels weren't well represented. So I decided to compile my own list as a quiz, in sincere imitation of the Book Riot quiz that inspired this effort. Like the Book Riot quiz, answers are in hidden (white) text next to the ANSWER label.

Good luck!

1. The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category.

ANSWER: Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson

2. "I always get the shakes before a drop."

ANSWER: Starship Trooper by Robert A. Heinlein

3. His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.

ANSWER: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

4. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

ANSWER: Neuromancer by William Gibson

5. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

ANSWER: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

6. It was a pleasure to burn.

ANSWER: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

7. 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.

ANSWER: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

8. The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.

ANSWER: More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

9. "Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."

ANSWER: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

10. A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.

ANSWER: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick

11. I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday.

ANSWER: Old Man's War by John Scalzi

12. "I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one."

ANSWER: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

13. There was a razorstorm coming in.

ANSWER: Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

14. In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

ANSWER: Ringworld by Larry Niven

15. The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

ANSWER: Hyperion by Dan Simmons


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