So here are five scenes I remember rereading immediately, and in each case have reread a few times since.
Neal Stephenson
, Snow Crash. You know this one already, right? The opening pages about the Deliverator and the deadline-challenged pizza delivery that gets it all rolling? Hard to improve on this opening, and it’s beloved by friends of mine who don’t normally care about science fiction. (As an aside, man there have been a lot of interesting covers for this book.)
Ian McEwan; Enduring Love. The opening scene is an astonishing balloon crash. I can’t speak for the rest of the book because as soon as McEwan’s books continue past their set pieces, I tend to get more and more irritated and stop. If I grow out of that, his prose will be the reason. But you won’t go wrong with this opening.
Guy Gavriel Kay; Under Heaven. The opening chapter details the protagonist’s period of mourning for his dead father. He spends two and a half years on a remote battlefield where his father had commanded, burying a fraction of the tens of thousands of skeletons left over from the battle, sheltered each night in a cabin among the weeping and screaming ghosts, and sometimes realizing that a voice he has gotten used to hearing has gone silent, meaning he has put their bones to rest. (Yes the book is also great.)
Naomi Novik; Uprooted. The wizards’ astonishing tower-defense against the army of the Queen.
Ian Banks; The Hydrogen Sonata. The scene in which a Culture ship lectures a rival ship about the dangers of playing soldiers. It’s a perfect bully-shutdown, and the moment when a character who happens to be a ship reveals to their rival, and the reader, what they truly think.
