Yglesias brings disturbing word of The Handmaid's Tale inching closer to reality.

io9's playing with great opening sentences from science fiction. (More at MeFi.) Contrary to the aesthetics of io9's list, it seems to me that the best are those which refuse to immediately announce themselves as science fiction. Here are just a few from favorite s.f. novels that I haven't seen anywhere else (all links go to Amazon):

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

"Mars was empty before we came."
—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

"On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back."
—Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

"What's it going to be then, eh?"
—Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Though what can match the quiet elegance of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed? "There was a wall."

Unless of course it's Octavia Butler in Dawn: "Alive!"

QUICK UPDATE: I realized too late that I'd omitted a book that should be on any list of this sort, Olaf Staledon's Star Maker:

One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill.

I've got a review of Sarah Hall's Atwoodesque dystopia Daughters of the North in this week's Independent. This review sort of skirts the line of what's acceptably graphic for print and what isn't, and frankly I'm a little amazed that I wasn't asked to rewrite the second paragraph—but I wasn't, and I mean it when I say the scene really stuck with me in a visceral way.

Here's the kernel:

It's this hope that may seem very far away in our moment of extraordinary rendition, emergency powers and unrestricted executive authority, a moment that isn't at all hard to connect with Hall's dystopia—which is why it's a little strange, and yet somehow at the same time absolutely necessary, to set out to read a book that you know will deliberately toy with and then destroy any hope you have for a better tomorrow. It's something like picking at a scab. Many of us have read Atwood and George Orwell, after all—and even those who haven't will learn all they need to know about what sort of book this is if they pay careful attention to the italicized words on the book's first page: English Authority Penal System Archive—record no. 498: Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock. Statement of female prisoner detained under Section 4(b) of the Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act. We know what sort of book we're in. We know this can't end well.

I'm reminded a bit of the words of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: "Let's save pessimism for better times." And yet Hall's dystopian story of resistance and struggle, even in its inevitable defeat, must be read at the same time as a kind of optimism, striking in its final pages a defiant chord that reminds us power can sometimes be defeated, if not always, and if always at great cost.