The Best Opening Lines in Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

The opening line of Bellamy’s utopian science fiction novel inverts one of the most common opening-line strategies in science fiction. 

Instead of saying something nonsensical, Bellamy says something perfectly reasonable–this book was published in 1888, so 1857 is a very reasonable year in this context. 

But Looking Backward is set in the then-distant year of 2000, which makes the normality of this line to 1880s readers somewhat unexpected in its own way. 

Bellamy plunges into his premise in the lines immediately following, putting words in the mouths of his readers (“’What!’ you say, ‘eighteen fifty-seven? … He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.’”), making them a part of his story while establishing his premise and retroactively making his opening line a hook. 

After all: how did someone from the 1800s end up in 2000s Boston?

You might know Terry Pratchett from Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman that became an Amazon show, but Discworld is a classic in its own right. The comedic fantasy series takes place on a disc, which in turn rests on the back of four elephants, who are themselves standing on the back of a giant turtle floating through the sky. 

That level of absurdity is reflected in The Light Fantastic (the second book in the Discworld series, if you choose to read them chronologically).  This opening line is reminiscent of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) with its hilarity and relatability. 

We all have times where we rise slowly, because we’re not sure it’s worth the effort … especially on Mondays.  

Published in 1870, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea opens with this matter-of-fact reference to what turns out to be a terrifying sea monster sighting and subsequent undersea expedition. 

But since none of this actually happened, the understated opening acts instead as a hook. It must have worked particularly well on readers at the time of publication, who would certainly have remembered any such incident just a few years before. 

A potential mass-murdering robot who decided that watching TV shows satiated them? Relatable. The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells are some of the most surprisingly heartwarming novellas that question humanity and consciousness, while still adding levity and wit. 

A lot of the best opening lines in fantasy and science fiction try to hook the reader and therefore buy time for the explanations that must follow. 

But Wells goes a different route in The War of the Worlds, and instead keeps things moving with a long roller-coaster of a first sentence that lays out the creepy first portion of his book’s premise. 

Similar to All Systems Red, the opening line of Gideon the Ninth combines traditional sci-fi/ fantasy staples with a seemingly out-of-place object—dirty magazines. It bends the genre with a weird new. 

The first line helps sum up this book, which features badass lesbian necromancers in space. What could be better?

Adams’ opening sentence sets up the tone of his novel from the start. It’s funny: that’s a heck of a way to describe what we guess has to be our sun, and the “unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm” is an absurd re-imagining of the galaxy as a community with hip and un-hip areas (and cardinal directions, for that matter). 

On top of that, the distant and condescending tone establishes a central theme of the book from the start: that we are, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. We may even be a little un-hip.

The Hitchhiker’s books have a special place in the science fiction and fantasy canon, and it's easy to see why. The first two books in the series have must-read first lines that draw you in immediately. Douglas Adams is a comedic genius, but also within his humor there is some absolutely astute observations about humanity and the universe as a whole. 

Morning Star by Pierce Brown is the third book in the original Red Rising trilogy. Those who read the first two didn’t need much convincing to continue through the finale (of sorts), but the writing here is beautiful and haunting. 

There’s a lot that can be pulled from this opening line, but the most important thing may be the unsettling memory evoked by “what had once been the gymnasium.” 

Gymnasiums, apparently, are not gymnasiums anymore. But our narrator knows what gymnasiums used to be, so we know that, whatever has gone wrong, it happened recently. 

Science fiction dystopias are often presented as being long-tenured, but The Handmaid’s Tale is so effective and so upsetting because it takes place in the near-future, in which readers can better appreciate the characters’ plight.

The word “psalm” in the title evokes something almost biblical, which might resonate oddly with some science-fiction and fantasy fans. However, from the first line, A Psalm for the Wild-Built shows exactly how beautifully technology, mysticism, and religion can intersect.

Robot consciousness and monks in one story? Sign us up. This story did not disappoint and is deserving of its Hugo Award for Best Novella.

A popular pick for the greatest opening line in sci-fi history, Bradbury’s quick, punchy line does a little less work than some of the others on this list. 

But what it lacks in versatility it makes up for in force, as it unsubtly drops the book’s disturbing central theme—book burning—while connecting it from the start with the flawed, sick things that bring people pleasure. 

It’s an almost-intimate sentence, and Bradbury drops it at the opening so that readers’ stomachs sink immediately.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016, and you can tell from reading one line that it was well-deserved. How did the world end? What could be more interesting than the end of the world? Questions like these make a reader flip to the next page to figure out what the hell they’re getting themselves into (in the absolute best of ways). 

The novel that coined the term “cyberspace” is tech-obsessed and often grim. Both of those things come across in Gibson’s iconic opening line, which references television static to describe the world—foreshadowing the way in which the book will use fictional “cyberspace” as a virtual-reality setting within its own fictional world. 

But we soon learn that this is the real sky, not something from cyberspace–in this book, even the real world is grey and mechanical. 

It’s possible to do too much with an opening line. Lewis greets readers returning to his Chronicles of Narnia series knowing full well that they know plenty of strange details about his settings from prior books, so he spends his first sentence introducing a key new character and establishing that he’s not such a likeable guy. We don’t really know why, or who this kid is, or where we are, but that’s okay—Lewis has the whole rest of the book to do all of that. Here, he’s content with an introduction, a laugh, and a memorable opening line.

The seemingly random capitalization of the words “Moon” and “Tides” make you want to keep reading immediately. The mystery becomes even more fascinating when you realize the book is written in a diary format. 

Piranesi is a wildly imaginative, perplexing, and beautiful story that truly lives up to its first line. 

The opening sentence of 1984 is often cited as one of the greatest opening lines in the history of literature—not just the science fiction genre. It’s easy to see why: Orwell’s opening line turns expectations on their heads, catching the reader’s attention from the start. But this scene offers more than just a hook: the ominous abnormality puts us ill-at-ease, the matter-of-fact way that this impossible fact is presented anticipates the bold lying of the government of Oceania, and even the details about the day—“cold” and “bright”—serve a purpose, helping us begin to narrow down where the story is set. He does all of this while alluding to an old saying that connects thirteen strokes of a clock to doubt and falsehoods. That’s a lot of work done before we hit the second sentence!

Like a lot of writers on this list, Tolkien wastes no time in introducing one of the weird and absurd elements of his story, instead choosing to use that thing (in this case, the existence of something called hobbits) as the story’s opening hook while also beginning to do the work of explaining some things. While he’s at this, Tolkien uses the syntax and diction of his opening sentence to emulate the cadence fairy tale or nursery rhyme style. It makes the hook a little more familiar and a little less frustrating while setting up the tone of The Hobbit, which was written for children and has much more of a bedtime-story vibe than Tolkien’s epic follow-up, The Lord of the Rings.

The opening sentence of Rowling’s Harry Potter series establishes the tone right from the start. With Harry off-camera, we meet the Dursleys in a sentence that they take over and, in their voices, wrap up with a snooty “thank you very much.” Rowling sets up her story to be exciting and fun by instantly convincing her readers to dislike the “normal” and its representatives. 

The fact that the magical world doesn’t feel immediately menacing in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (even though magic killed Harry’s parents, which seems like a big deal) is a mark of Rowling’s skill as a writer. She accomplished this by cultivating the prissy, boring, normal world and its Dursley inhabitants as a foil to the colorful world of magic—a strategy that is in motion from the very first sentence of the book.

Vonnegut’s most acclaimed novel is a satirical blend of semi-autobiographical fiction and chaotic science fiction. Some parts of his novel will be more (or less!) true than other parts, and the distinction does not appear to be of much importance in the book. And none of this has to be gleaned from the back cover or critical reviews or a study of Vonnegut’s work – it’s all in the actual text of the book as it opens. And that means we know one other thing: the narrator, whoever they may turn out to be, has already outed him or herself as unreliable even within the fictional world of the story.