TRIVIA QUIZ

POP QUIZ No. 74

 

FIRST LINES OF SCIENCE FICTION STORIES

 

Below are the first sentences (or two or three...) from various science fiction short stories. Name the story (1 pt) and author (1 pt), for a total of 40 pts. (NOTE: At least one author is repeated.)

 

1. Lightning was drawn to the spot. Season after season, August to November, but most heavily in September, the jagged killing bolts sought out George Gibree's orchard.

2. "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery."

3. "Ninety-Eight - Ninety-nine - One Hundred." Gloria withdrew her chubby little forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and blinking in the sunlight.

4. Juliette entered her bedroom, smiling, and a thousand Juliettes smiled back at her.

5. Un and Sub, the giants, are grinding him for food. (first line after introductory quotation)

6. The photon storm struck without warning, pouncing upon the Ship from behind a bank of giant red stars. Eye barely had time to flash a last second warning through Talker before it was upon them.

7. In the beginning, Ngai lived alone atop the mountain called Kirinyaga.

8. Mr. John Philip Johnson shut his front door behind him and came down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn't the sun warm and good, and didn't his shoes feel comfortable after the resoling, and he knew that he had undoubtedly chosen the precise very tie which belonged with the day and the sun and his comfortable feet, and, after all, wasn't the world just a wonderful place?

9. The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap with rusty spoons.

10. Dad was in the basement centrifuging mouse spleen hybridoma, when I informed him that I'd enrolled at the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty.

11. The gray-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived.

12. He stood in the Portobello Road and screamed up at the closed windows. "Anatole! Anatole, hey! Come to the window! Open up, hey, Anatole! The war's started!"

13. Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it- naked.

14. Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don't worry; I'm not going political on you.

15. "This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer."

16. On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road.

17. X- This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.

18. Dylan was coming to Chicago.

19. In an October dusk that smelled of smoke and apples, a lady in a black duster coat and a broad-brimmed hat, heavily veiled, called at Rainey's Emporium in Foster's Glen, New York. She descended from the driver's seat of a black Packard, drawing the eye of every man who lounged on the wooden steps of the crossroads store and attracting a second murmuring throng of idlers from Alvin Vernier's barber shop across the way.

20. Somehow the idea was brought up by Mom that perhaps the whole family would enjoy a fishing trip. But they weren't Mom's words; Timothy knew that. They were Dad's words, and Mom used them for him somehow.

 

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