perfidy

Nothing will ever (in my mind, for that is what we are discussing) match the majesty and towering crudity of this sentence, drawn from the sad but proud ranks of the runners-up of the never to be sufficiently praised and damned Bulwer-Lytton contest:

Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre creep."

But some of these come pretty damn close:

"A few hours had passed since they had been pulled away from the moon. A few hours and millions of miles. The moon was no longer visible, not even as a star. The whole thing was so crazy, weird and far-out. It was as though they were floating in a giant vacuum." -- Sara Cavanaugh, A Woman in Space

Ya think?

"They shook hands, and Jason set about retrieving his balls." -- Peter Heath, The Mind Brothers

That's some kind of handshake.

"Wearing an aura of rugged-intellectual charm like a plastic raincoat ..." -- Sam Merwin Jr, The Time Shifters

He knows me! Except I would have said rain slicker...

"Her very existence made his forebrain swell until it threatened to leak out his sinuses." -- Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark

Speaking of Hilary...

"He lifted her tee-shirt over her head. Her silk panties followed." -- Peter F. Hamilton, Mindstar Rising

That's gotta sting. Atomic wedgie from hell.

Thanks to Cassandra Villainous Company for finding this painful compendium of science-fictional excrescences. All of these (I think) are taken from the middle of books. On the whole, though, it strikes me that most sf novels generally have good first sentences.