Top Ten Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature

Head over to AlternativeReel to check out their list of the Top Ten Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature. The top three are coincidently three of my favorite books: Hitchhikers Guide, Neuromancer, and 1984. Here’s number ten, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, which I remember reading for the first time in seventh grade, during one of the many days I chose not to participate in gym…

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Another Hitchhiker’s Guide on the Way — Please No

Actually, panic all you want. Drink straight from the bottle, Russian Roulette, all that. Douglas Adams died seven years ago, and now his widow Jane Belson is doing the equivalent of exhuming his corpse, cutting his head off, and shitting down his neck. She is allowing children’s author Eoin Colfer to write a sixth Hitchhiker’s book. Fuck. No. From Yahoo News:

Called “And Another Thing…,” the new novel will be published in October 2009. Colfer said he was a big fan of the original books, which started as a BBC radio serial.

“For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world,” he said in a statement. “It is a gift from the Gods. So, thank you Thor and Odin.”

Adams had expressed displeasure over the bleak tone of the fifth book, Mostly Harmless, which ends with the complete destruction of every version of the Earth in every possible timeline, along with the death of nearly all the regular characters. While this would seem to make a continuation extremely unlikely,

Adams had remarked that the afterlife-enhanced state of the regulars merely meant he would not have to waste time at the beginning of the next book gathering them together or explaining what they’d been up to in the intervening period.

I’m going to go buy some lube for my Childhood. It’s going to need it.