There is a month to go before the closing date (June 30) for entries in the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC). Aim of the competition ? to write the worst possible opening sentence to the worst novel imaginable.
I may yet dream up an entry or two for this year. To help inspire the rest of you ? by showing how bad you can be ? here are all the entries I submitted for the 2006 competition (I didn't enter last year because my heart was pretending it belonged somewhere else, like in a dead person, maybe). Two of my entries won category awards. I'm sure many of you can write much worse, so please go for it.
Winning entry: Science Fiction
"Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons," Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, "and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds."
Winning entry: Historical Fiction
While Hector and the heroes of Troy trembled behind the ramparts as cowboys below the walls raced up and down the beach, six-guns blazing and cries of "yee-hah!" filling the air, other cowboys across the sea were labouring gamely but in vain to throw a palisade around Wichita, Kansas, thereby adding veracity to the old homily of history that it is easier to cow a fortified city than to fortify a cow city.
Entries that won NOTHING and might as well have been so much spiked copy on a sub-editor's desk
The apparent contradiction between Article 100 of the Companies Act, empowering the Registrar of Companies to destroy documents more than ten years old, and Article 101, obliging the Registrar to make and keep copies of all documents before destroying them, was the last thing on Sepp's mind as the bus driver took off her bra and pointed her pendulous pair at her passengers.
The "brr, rat-a-tat" of machine-guns, the "blam-blam" of carbines, the "thoom, thoom" of mortars, the "krrrrr" of automatic pistols, the "bang" of field guns, the "crack" of grenades, the "boom" of howitzers, the "ka-blooey" of even bigger howitzers, the "aaargh" of the wounded, all of these swelled into BRR RAT-A-TAT BLAM-BLAM THOOM THOOM KRRRRR BANG CRACK BOOM KA-BLOOEY AAARGH as the battle intensified.
The much-married and much-widowed Esmerelda Maria was thought of in the local community as a type of spider, although not as a black widow, the Latrodectus mactans, but rather as a furrow spider, the Nuctenea cornuta, a small spider about nine millimetres long which makes its home in buildings in many regions of the northern hemisphere and which also eats its male mate, but only sometimes, so that the male often escapes and goes away to eat a moth or a cricket, a pleasure that none of Esmerelda Maria's late husbands would ever know.
Gracie had bought into the fitness program to become toned, not hard, and certainly not hard in the sense of the Mohs scale for minerals, which starts with talc, then gypsum, and goes all the way up through quartz, topaz and carborundum to diamond, although if she had to rate herself according to Mohs right now, she would be somewhere between calcite and fluorite, and she wanted her buns to end up more in line with apatite or orthoclase.
I knew my son would spend the rest of his life torn between hugely conflicting emotions ? boundless gratitude for my faith in his hypothesis that he'd hear a tune for ever if he injected embalming fluid into his cochlea, and abiding resentment because I had put on "The Chicken Song" while he was doing it.
Subtly and skilfully edging ever closer to her as they watched a reddening moon dip towards the beckoning horizon, Malcolm leaned close to Angela's tantalising earlobe and whispered huskily, "If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it, this pathetic, worm-ridden puppy, while I go and get myself a nice parasite-free cat?"
The magnitude of his blunder struck Stanley like a Scud missile as he flipped through his finally printed thesis on the comparative intelligence of animals in which he had painstaking justified the ranking of the gorilla at number four and the orang-utan at number five, for only now, when it was far, far too late, did he suddenly realize that in his exhaustive assessment of all the sentient creatures on earth, he had completely forgotten to include Professor Stephen Hawking.
"Tree kangaroos are really kinda cute," Corporal Walt Wilson scrawled in his diary, driven by the determination to include at least one cuddly arboreal marsupial in his memoirs of the conflict in Afghanistan.
"Your Majesty?" the chancellor said uncertainly as the queen pushed another rectal thermometer into the grapefruit.
Terence stretched out a hand to switch off the alarm, rolled lazily onto his side, blearily opened his eyes, and involuntarily recoiled at the sight of the fourteen Japanese students trying to make sushi in the wardrobe.
My death was excruciatingly painful yet somehow exhilarating, like the time I stuck my finger into a pot of boiling mercury.
The president of the mightiest nation on earth carefully placed a red cabbage on a tripod, lifted his aluminium baseball bat, and prepared to start the strangest game of golf he would ever play.
It was my third wish, the one for an independent brain in each leg, that really staggered me.
As if fending off thirteen lions wasn't challenge enough, Dennis now had to face forty-seven elephants with big bayonets on their trunks.
You remember that joke about the Englishman, the Scotsman and the Irishman where the Englishman happens to be the brother-in-law who stole my career, the Scotsman happens to be me and the Irishman happens to be the hit-man I hired to kill the Englishman?
"Come, child," whispered the old man as he took little Meg by the hand, "let's see if the chickens have finished eating your brother."
Sunday being a day of silent reflection, Mavis Gordon would stand in front of a mirror for hours without saying a word.
The problem was not that there were 12,304,502,749,674,902,175,887,204 protons in the Universe, the problem was that one of them was missing.
Manfred wouldn't have minded the incessant, repeated, too-oft heard jibes that he had inherited his mother's short, stumpy legs if it wasn't for the bitter fact that his sister had inherited all the Renoirs and Manets.
The most revealing interview with the author Neville Garforth was the one in which he confessed that he larded his prose with foreign phrases such as mi casa es su casa, cul-de-sac, que sera sera, son et lumiere and via con dios so that he could discomfort his readers and relish the schadenfreude.
Yet another confluence of the two factors that had dominated so much of Gerald Fenster's life ? his gigantic passion for German classical music of the Romantic era, and his abysmally pathetic handwriting ? occurred on that day when he opened the mail-order parcel and extracted his new CD recording of the Eggnog Synfoniak by BlogNozen.
In spite of the initial enthusiasm for a free thinker on the team, the faculty reluctantly had to concede that it needed an anthropologist who would classify civilizations according to more precise parameters than "literate", "illiterate" and "struck by lightning".
The human body contains any number of elements and substances ? iron, copper, phosphorus, peptic acid, nostril-hairs and slippery things trapped somewhere in the digestive tract ? and Miss Idaho had them all.
To a fetishist like Vernon Gribley the course on reflexology had been like a dream come true, for now he could not only stir himself into a supercharged state of arousal as he caressed her smooth, velvety, delicious feet, he could also press on just the right spot to improve her digestion of fatty acids.
When the oh-so-British A. A. Milne called upon us to hush, hush because young Christopher Robin was saying his prayers, could it have been that the boy was praying that he might become more famous than his teddy bear, and if that was so, by what quirk of divine irony did it come about that Walt Disney turned Winnie the Pooh, not Christopher Robin, into an American?
"My husband may be Hassidic but he's always reckoned his great-grandfather was an Apache," Mrs Furnitz tried to explain, "and that's probably why he was doing a rain-dance at Schul."
Doctor Mukerjee, Ph.D. in quantum physics, watched in fascination as his reincarnation of Winston Churchill gloated to the shade of Adolph Hitler, "We're going to do the prequel to the 1966 Football World Cup final, but instead of sending Bobby Charlton against you guys, we're going to use Lancaster bombers."
He might never have been stuck with this now bloated, flabby, nagging shrew of a Frenchwoman if he'd only known that "je t'aime, mon coeur" was not the translation of "please train my dog."
Investors swarmed in their hundreds to fund the Organic Enlargement Project when we presented our flawless argument that if a germ was as big as a cutworm, you could hit it with a hammer, and if a bacterium grew to the size of a timber wolf, you could cure disease with a hunting rifle, and even if bullets didn't work because microbes have no vital organs, it would be damned nearly impossible for any organism the size of a big mammal to sneak into your pancreas while you weren't looking.
The anxiety that Janet felt when the doctor told her the scar tissue should be removed surgically was tempered by a small measure of relief that he hadn't insisted it should be removed with a pair of pliers and a rusty Swiss Army knife wielded by a crazed swami from Madras seeking communication with the inner planet of Arcturus, since that procedure had left her sister with an even uglier scar.
"I know this is going to confound a lot of you," said the oldest and toughest-looking of the survivors we plucked from the lifeboat after their three-month ordeal in the middle of an unusually stormed-tossed Pacific, "but we're all atheists."
"No, sir, no atheists in this lifeboat," one of the smug survivors gleefully told his rescuers, "we threw them all overboard for not saying 'Hallelujah!' when we threw an atheist overboard."
Geologically battered yet again by adverbs that amphibiously refused to make any sense, Steven Verbio staggered contemporaneously down the passage, lumbered intermittently into his room, lurched opaquely into bed and fell into a diagonally restless sleep until he woke up posthumously.
"Yep, that should do it, I reckon," said chief maintenance engineer Bo Wackerley, "paintin' them ozone-wreckin' supersonic bombers to look like big swans should keep Greenpeace happy."
The offer of a free haircut looked pretty good to Donovan until he read the fine print, the section where it said the electric clippers, scissors, razor, brush and comb would be provided, but he should bring his own spanners.
Rupert Muldoon gathered Miss Chatworthy in his arms, drew her soft, shining face to his shoulder and murmured, "If your older sister's name was Jane after your father's mother, and your parents named your younger sister Dianne for your mother's mother, why did they call you Bouttros Bouttros Ghali Plovdiv?"
"Oi 'ave ter bring in the harvest, old Bess needs milkin' and then Oi'm goin' down ter the pub," said Joe, his bucolic English west country accent utterly dumbfounding the other islanders who had never heard him speak anything except Fijian.
Roger Bacon his name might have been, but a descendant of the famous Roger Bacon this accountant almost certainly was not, as I deduced from his singular lack of interest in attempting to invent gunpowder or burn the back of my hand with a magnifying glass, not to mention his complete absence of enthusiasm when I asked if I could set fire to his potted fern, which someone had forgotten to water and which was now as brown and lifeless as the official opposition in Zimbabwe.
"Mary Beth is the girl I would ask to marry me if she wasn't my daughter and if I wasn't married to her mother and if I wasn't in love with Renée Zellweger and if Mary Beth wouldn't drive me mad because she's organized and if I wouldn't drive her mad because of my uncanny resemblance to Clint Eastwood which only I can see, and a very disorganized, daydreaming Clint Eastwood at that," continued the grizzled guy at the bar before concluding, "which all adds up to a sentence I doubt I'll ever finish, it's got way too many clauses, so I'll have to start again."
At last it dawned on Basil Orsmond why it always seemed there were more churches in a small country town than in a great, throbbing metropolis ? if everyone went to church in the city, it would take a heck of a long time to walk back to their small country town after the Sunday service.
It was Dr Cruet who persuaded even the doubters in cosmology that although matter must exist in space, space could not exist inside matter, the main thrust of his argument being not that the existence of space inside matter would make it impossible to discern that the universe was expanding, but that if the protons and neutrons in our flesh were expanding in pace with the cosmic expansion, our noses would explode.
"Dad, I don't mind the way they've feminised your name in so many other ways ? Christine, Christina, Christa, Chrissy," my ever-carping daughter whined, "but did you and Mom have to call me Christopherette?"
While soaping himself in the quaint old shower with the curtains drawn back from the full-length window, which was wide open to allow the balmy breezes to caress his skin with their tropical warmth as he returned the friendly waves of the passing natives, it suddenly dawned on Mozzer that he was probably waving back with more than his hands.
I don't know how many years ago it was that I first heard the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul, yet it still came as a shock to me when my ophthalmologist put me in front of the CRT scanner, focused somewhere near my retinas and pronounced, "I see dead people."
It was deep in the scarp forest inland from the Indian Ocean that we decided the leader of the troop of vervet monkeys looked Irish, largely because of his bushy eyebrows and his quizzical, almost amused expression, and not because he had a large blue scrotum.
The principal role players did not meet on a level playing field because time and tide, waiting for no man, decreed that their one-on-one clash of the Titans should occur on a steep grassy bank where they fought like cat and dog as they went at it hammer and tongs, which sounds like Russian communists fighting Chinese gangs and which was, to put it in a nutshell, no less bloody.
His dismal record in taxonomy notwithstanding, his utter failure, indeed, to name anything new in all of his lack-lustre career, could not dampen Professor Basmati's resolve to identify just one hitherto unknown species which he would call a "korange", a single but triumphant accomplishment that would satisfy his raging passion to give the English language a word to rhyme with "orange".
Reflecting on his relationship with Janice, Malcolm decided she had a huge number of attributes in common with his Staffordshire terrier since Janice, too, was cute and sleek and well-muscled, she was good at leaping into the air, she had no peer when it came to burying mouldy old bones in the garden and digging them up when she felt like chewing on something, she loved it when he scratched her behind her furry, floppy ears, and most of all she didn't mind at all when he confused her with other species.
Echoing and amplifying the immortal utterance recorded when Neil Armstrong placed his feet on the face of the Moon, Commander James Bronski elected to embrace the whole planet as he stepped down from the airlock of Mariner 15 to the surface of Mars: "That's one small step for Oman, one giant leap for Manchuria."
Ever the pragmatic, Father Luigi Rizzi reminded his parishioners that the cardinals would send a plume of white smoke out of the Sistine Chapel chimney to show when they had elected a new Pope, because something would be very wrong if white smoke was coming out of all the doors and windows, and pink smoke would signify not the profoundly significant choice of a new Pontiff but that one of the dopier cardinals had carelessly dropped his red cloak in the fireplace again.
An almost palpable veil of gloom descended upon Roger Winchester, otherwise youthfully exuberant lecturer in the English department, as he observed to Mary Sortflank, his tutorial assistant, that the three books which now lived in a cardboard carton at the bottom of the stationery cupboard once used to be handsome inclusions in the bookcases before the cats shredded the books' spines, adding for Miss Sortflank's edification that it should be "the spines of the books", not "the book's spines", since it was improper usage to associate a possessive pronoun with an inanimate object, a convention which, if strictly observed, would make sense to Victorians and some contemporary English lecturers, although sadly ? to him ? it would seem overly pedantic in normal conversation.
"This is just not fair," whimpered Corporal Smooney as a withering hail of fire erupted from the German trenches, "getting killed is bad enough, but being withered as well, that's nasty!"
Fate chose the cruellest time for the miniature black hole to dissolve inside Arthur Kincaid's head, the mini black hole being a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but not yet detected until that searing event when one of them evaporated with an energy release equivalent to the output of a ten megawatt power station, partly boiling away Arthur's brain and then exploding his skull in a shower of gleaming white bone fragments, so that one moment he had been growling to his mistress, "You're always on my mind, babe," and the next instant his steaming mind was all over her.
Exciting though retinal surgery was to Doctor Morton, he occasionally gave way to brief bouts of regret that ophthalmologists seldom have anything extraordinarily interesting to tell their wives about their jobs since so few of them have gunfights with opticians or chase the Glaucoma Gang in Ferraris with machine-guns where the parking lights should be.
By the end of the movie James was more convinced than ever, if that was possible, that the electron did not have a dual existence as a particle and a wave, it was merely a particle whose probable location was described by the Schroedinger wave equation, his certainty about this interpretation sweeping aside his wife's scolding that he should try to concentrate on Steven Segal for two hours without scribbling equations on the popcorn container.
Peter Fletter found strange comfort in his acceptance that not only was there a macroscopic probability, however small, that a bee would sting his toe on Friday, there was also a quantum probability, even smaller, that it would be the same bee that had stung his sister on the toe the previous week, even though that bee was now squashed and had no stinger, and there was an even tinier probability that that very same bee would one day sting Renée Zellweger and she would ask him to rub antihistamine ointment on her toe.
"Since wearing your heart on your sleeve as an unbridled display of infatuation is not only unhygienic and disgusting but mortally unsafe," Agnes Faraday warned her moon-eyed daughter Sally, "it would be much more sensible to wear a less vital organ in a place where you'd be less likely to bump it into things."
Hacking up phlegm as he coughed himself awake, loosening his pants as he stumbled towards the bathroom, skating his uneaten meal across the floor in the hope that a cat would eat it, the President wished again that he would stop falling asleep at state banquets.
(Edited to include the BLFC URL)
Edited by Scipio, 28 May 2008 - 12:47 AM.
