Love the Gibson one. Another classic opening line, one of the few that I can still quote verbatim, is from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
The Gibson opening line is great, but it's been a long time since it was common to see dull grey static on dead channels. Now, the color of a dead channel is bright electric blue. I wonder if in the future Neuromancer will need footnotes to explain the imagery, like Shakespeare editions that explain that "quick" used to mean "pregnant".
"William Gibson's Neuromancer: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'"
That is one of my favorite openers, too, but it has seemed weirdly anachronistic for a while. Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static? Will anyone in Gibson's future?
We do still see static if we accidentally switch to the analog terrestial receiver built into our TV. And given the general quality of Samsung's software and UI engineering, that accident happens quite often.
>Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static?
I do. In fact I've seen it in the past 24 hours. I want to at some point hook up a microcontroller to an old TV with a coax cable and subtly manipulate the static until a shadow person emerges from the spotty mist. I figure it would make a cool demo. [0]
Two other great examples:
William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael."
Neither strictly tells the reader what the books are about, but they're great hooks.