Page 123, Fifth Sentence

Paul tagged me with a meme, and it's fun, so I'm doing it.

The instructions:

“To participate, you grab any book, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and blog it. Then tag five people.”

Here's the non-fiction entry:

If |ψ> and |ψ'> are normalized. then an arbitrary linear combination, α|ψ> + β|ψ'>, is not.

It's from Principles Of Quantum Mechanics by Ramamurti Shankar. Which is big and has a red cover and contains stuff I have forgotten and has an author I cannot stop calling Ravi Shankar.

It's not quite as good as this though:

Unfortunately, most do not.

A quote from The C++ Programming Language (Third Edition) by Bjarne Stroustrup. A classic.

Fictionwise I'd have reached for Snow Crash, if Paul had not already done that. So instead I reached for Neuromancer, but guess what? Page 123 is a title page:

PART THREE

Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne

Not a sentence in sight. Hmm. So how about:

I was the only adult there, an unusual situation that neither Doris nor I would have wanted, I'm sure.

Which really doesn't make Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson sound very appealing does it? (It is in fact, wonderful.) I have a feeling that this game is better with non-fiction books.

I tag everyone at SFSignal (if they haven't already done it).