Dr. Potbury brought the slip of paper closer to his vest and looked at Hoag over his spectacles. "Any particular reason," he asked, "why you should find blood under your fingernails?"

"No. That is to say -- Well, no -- there isn't. But it is blood -- isn't it?"

"No," Potbury said heavily. "No, it isn't blood."

Hoag knew that he should have felt relieved. But he was not. He knew in that moment that he had clung to the notion that the brown grime under his fingernails was dry blood rather than let himself dwell on other, less tolerable, ideas.

(Robert A. Heinlein)

quote:

---

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

The first human expedition to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself. At that time, eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, an interplanetary trip made by humans had to be made in free-fall orbits – from Terra to Mars, two hundred-fifty-eight Terran days, the same for return, plus four hundred fifty-five days waiting at Mars while the planets crawled back into positions for the return orbit.

Only by refueling at a space station could the Envoy make the trip. Once at Mars she might return – if she did not crash, if water could be found to fill her reaction tanks, if a thousand things did not go wrong.

---

The first paragraph could be a great hook. But we don't find anything more about Smith for nearly two pages. These first few paragraphs probably contain close to a half-dozen no-nos for contemporary openings.

Contrast that opening with its dry discourse on orbital mechanics and its vague reference to the many things that could go wrong but don't with the opening from Starship Troopers, one of my favorite Heinlein works.

quote:

---

I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important – it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.

I couldn’t say anything about that; I’ve never been a race horse. But the fact is: I’m scared silly, every time.

At D-minus-thirty, after we had mustered in the drop room of the Roger Young, our platoon leader inspected us. He wasn’t our regular platoon leader, because Lieutenant Rasczak had bought it on our last drop; he was really the platoon sergeant....

---

Sometimes I wonder if Heinlein got by with some of this because he was Heinlein. I remember reading "Starship Troopers" and not liking it as much as the others I've read. (Eight others by then---my opinion of it hasn't changed on later repeated readings.) Certainly from the opening, the book, which takes a Godawful time in getting back to its story, didn't inspire me.

"Stranger in a Strange Land" didn't appeal to me much either. (It was in the same boxed set as "Starship Troopers"---but my opinion of it has improved with age.) That whole first chapter is one long description setting up subsequent chapters. Essentially it has one character, and we barely get to know him before he's gone, the story focuses on his son (mostly seen through other eyes) and we learn little of any of the events as described---something that might've been a novel in itself.

In, say, "Citizen of the Galaxy," Heinlein starts with a child in a terrible predicament---being sold as a slave. From there, the story procedes in more-or-less linear fashion. Flashbacks consisted of passing mentions---we learned what had happened to the character to get him to that predicament, but they never interfere with the current story. (This was the thirty-fifth or so Heinlein I read---I couldn't turn up a copy for more than two years after finding the others most of the others---but in the meantime I discovered Asimov and Clarke and the science fiction magazines.)

Heinlein could be better than others in "the hook"---sometimes violating rules in the process---but he also got away with a lot and was forgiven for it.