Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Wait, I read this! Can’t remember the name of the book right now though.
Edit: Ok, I remember it from a screenshot in a thread about cheeky textbooks
Yeah, it’s an oldie.
Fun fact, Boltzmann hung himself while Ehrenfest shot his 15 year old son and then himself.
This one tops my list, probably followed by the opening to hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy.
it hits differently these days, but: “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel” -William Gibson, Neuromancer
Neil Gaiman makes a reference to that in Neverwhere, using ‘TV tuned to a dead channel’ to describe a cloudless blue sky.
Lovely books, horrible human being, apparently. Such a shame
I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus’
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.
Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files
Damn, I really don’t have an original thought in my head
The more we communicate in memes and pop culture references, the closer we get to going full Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Di’caprio, his finger pointing
Redford, when the mountain man nodded
If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.
– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he’s done. “An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop”
Some beautiful turns of phrase throughout. Maybe I should revisit these now that I’m less worried about missing out on something, so I can just browse and skip around.
He was a big fan of the power of the first line. You can really see it in a lot of his books.
His last ever book started with
“The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado.”
Or maybe it’s the second para. I haven’t got my copy on me. But I memorised the last bit on the spot.
Yeah I haven’t read that one in a while
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Stephen King
Talk about a hook! I can think of 5 obvious questions the reader will have from that simple sentence.
Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.
If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
If it’s not already trivia you know, apparently Tolkien just wrote that line on a piece of paper one day and just built the story around it.
Hopefully it’s not apocryphal.
That’s cool, I hope it’s true 😆 I heard he basically told the story to his kids and formalized it later, but either way that’s a great origin.
Snow Crash really has fallen off the radar. Really ignited my interest in cyberpunk when I read it 30+ years ago.
It’s terrifying how familiar a lot of his world feels nowadays.
Yeah, absolutely. That and Jennifer Government. We’re getting all the shitty dystopian aspects of cyberpunk without all the cool technological advances.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife’s grave. Then, I joined the army.
- John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
Ah damn how did I forget this one?! One of my absolute favorite books!
I ugly laughed a lot when I read it the first time.
“Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.”
-John Scalzi, The Android’s Dream
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go.
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Which early Prachett book starts with a guru or wizard obtaining enlightenment then asking his apprentice “go on ask me any question I have observed everything and know it all!” the appretice asked him what he wants for breakfast “ah, one of the difficult ones”
Definitely an upper quartile Pratchett.
Thank you,
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘One of the difficult ones.’
I like “The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.” from The Light Fantastic
There’s good eatin’ on those things!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I also really like the Bridget Jones’ Diary homage to this by Helen Fielding
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.
I don’t care about the book, it’s contents nor its attitude, but in terms of summing up the tone of a book, it does a hell of a good job.
I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs, began to take hold.
Fear and loathing in las vegas
I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, “it was a dark and stormy night.” There’s a reason it became cliche. It’s very evocative.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984
The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off
It reads like poetry to me
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
- It, by Stephen King.
Other than the very shocking gang bang scene it’s a great novel.
Wait, what? Missed that one, should probably re-read.
not worth reading for that one, friend
Between, um, Beverly and all the boys.
