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Comment by chrisbaker98 | Hacker News Reader

And what makes it even funnier is that they all sound like they could be from a real Dan Brown novel.

Or Charles Stross, or Peter Watts. A lot of modern prose starts with illusions of grandeur and name-dropping.

I challenge you to find a sentence or paragraph from either author like these. Please cite the relevant book.

Received editorial wisdom these days is that you have at most 100 words to capture the reader's attention (and by "capture" I mean "drag it into the back of your serial killer van, sedate it, hog-tie it, then re-enact that classic scene from A Clockwork Orange -- only in prose") or they'll put the book down and never look at it again.

FYI, a typical page in a paperback novel contains 300-400 words: the preceding paragraph/sentence is 61 words long (per wc(1)).

So starting with a bang is mandatory, if you want to get paid to write for a living.

Welcome to the short attention span society!

"So starting with a bang is mandatory"

Maybe that explains two of my favourite opening lines that both include things blowing up:

"It was the day my grandmother exploded"

and

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

> Received editorial wisdom these days is that you have at most 100 words to capture the reader's attention

What's weird about this is how I find Jane Austen's intros catch my attention, although they often have only tangential relation to the actual characters or plot of the book. The first chapter of Persuasion is about a vain, foolish, impoverished baronet whose primary comfort when he's down is to see his own name written in the massive tome of nobility. The main character is barely mentioned until the end of the chapter. But for some reason, I've always found it strangely engaging. Why do I care about this guy? But for some reason, I do -- at least, I'm hooked long enough to get to the actually interesting characters.

> Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

Starts kinda OK but pretentiousness creeps in towards the end.

Compare that to the best SF book I know to date, Pandem:

> On the twenty-ninth of February, on the strangest of the days marked on the calendar, David Hammer, an employee of a respected city newspaper, was returning home a little later than usual.

> It was a humid, almost spring evening. At Charing Cross Station, David boarded a train that was due to drop him off in East Croydon in half an hour. There was no one in the compartment for eight at that hour, except David and a guy of about eighteen, who, having fallen on the seat, immediately closed his eyes and gave himself to the power of music flowing from the flat box of the player into the black clips of headphones.

Unfortunately I don't think it was ever translated to English :)

Is Dan Brown a postmodernist author these days?

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