Opening Sentences

A chapter of a novel can kick off either with dialogue and/or a character's point of view or with an infodump by the omniscient narrator and Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind makes excellent use of both approaches.

"'You can't leave now,' Daniel Holm told his son." (I, p. 437)

"Avalon rotates in 11 hours, 22 minutes, 12 seconds, on an axis tilted 21 degrees from the normal to the orbital plane." (II, p. 452)

"A campaign against Ythri would demand an enormous fleet, gathered from everywhere in the Empire." (IV, p. 477)

"The conference was by phone." (V, p. 490)

"Where the mighty Sagittarius flows into the Gulf of Centaurs, Avalon's second city - the only one besides Gray which rated the name - had arisen as riverport, seaport, spaceport, industrial center, and mart." (VI, p. 499)

"'Our basic strategy is simple,' Admiral Cajal had explained." (VII, p. 511)

"Slowly those volumes of space wherein the war was being fought contracted and neared each other." (VIII, p. 524)

So far, the chapter beginnings have more or less alternated in style. I skipped past Chapter III because it does both. An initial short paragraph presents the point of view of the as yet unidentified rider in a descending aircar, then, after a double paragraph space:

"With an equatorial diameter of a mere 11,308 kilometers, Avalon has a molten core smaller in proportion than Terra's; a mass of 0.635 cannot store as much heat." (III, p. 463)