My local Waterstone’s (a UK bookstore, in case you were wondering) runs a monthly competition asking readers to identify four books from their opening lines. To make it easier the novelists’ initials are also given. Each month there is a different genre, and the lines this month are from “Early Dystopian Fiction”. The novels’ opening lines are:

a) “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.” (HGW)

Not one to break sweat over I think you would agree.

b) “Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning” (FK)

A fantastic opening line, which I think is even better when the earlier translation for “spreading lies” “traduced” is used.

c) “The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.” (SL)

This line has really grown on me – the accumulated detail of the small-town America it describes seems so deceptively stable and secure.

d) “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” (AH)

Once you work out the initials the novel will come to you quickly enough.

My initial impression was that this selection stretches if not abuses the term ‘dystopian fiction’. Sure it has a fairly flexible definition, but are these novels really dystopias?

Dystopian fiction imagines an world in which society is grim and frightening. By that definition The Time Machine certainly meets the criteria. The future in Wells’ novel is one in which man has degenerated into two distinct species, one predating the other.

Kafka is hard to align to a specific genre, but I have never considered The Trial (b) as dystopian. Nightmarish without doubt, but far too strongly rooted in the real world. The Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, (c) which by coincidence I read and reviewed earlier this month, is set in the immediate future and again is firmly fixed in the real world of American and European politics – unlike say the 2004 Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America which imagines an alternative USA in which the aviator, anti-semite and proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh is elected President, which is more speculative despite the obvious parallels with the Lewis novel.

Finally I am sure you will have worked out that (d) is from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, probably the only purely dystopian novel here, although they have cheated and given the end of the opening sentence only rather than the whole thing, (“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.” Two sentences, I know) presumably on the basis that giving just the first sentence it would have made it much too hard, and the first two sentences too easy.

I don’t think we need to try and squeeze novels into constricting boxes with genre labels on them and I appreciate the quiz was just a bit of fun. If it gets people reading these books then great.

For what it is worth my four dystopian novels would have been:

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” (GO).

Easy I know, but quite possibly one of the greatest opening lines in literature, full stop.

“What’s it going to be then, eh?’ That was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.” (AB)

Not getting any harder are they?

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. (KI)

This one I think is genuinely tricky but I did review it quite recently.

“All this happened, more or less” (KV)

Good luck! What would be your choices?