*applauds* Well done.

It was late, I was sleepy, and ultimately, I realized that there was nothing I could say about Heinlein's classic opening line that would be more eloquent than the line itself.

However, to be rather less eloquent:

It's my favorite opening line, not just because Stranger almost always tops the list of my favorite books, but because it's just so efficient. It's fraught with implications, and the book itself is an exploration of those implications: how is it that an entity that can be accurately called a "Martian" came to have an eminently mundane North American name like "Smith"?

I must confess that I deliberately misquoted, however. There are two editions of Stranger, each with its own variation of the opening line. The 1961 edition opens with:

Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.

The "Complete, Uncut" 1991 edition, based on Heinlein's much longer manuscript, opened instead with:

Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

The simpler version I used was closer to the line that inspired the novel: when giving a speech at a a science fiction convention about "unpronouncable" alien names, Heinlein concluded with: "Besides, whoever heard of a Martian named Smith?"

Edited at 2011-02-06 08:03 pm (UTC)

If you haven't read Stranger, I highly recommend it. Either edition.

You know, I think I have that somewhere...

...buried in a box somewhere that got moved around by people while I was out of state.

*mutter...*