Mark Worden let me know that the results are in for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which the English Department at San Jose State University asks entrants to come up with the worst opening sentence for a novel.
Among the winners is this classic:
Kirk’s mind raced as he quickly assessed his situation: the shields were down, the warp drive and impulse engines were dead, life support was failing fast, and the Enterprise was plummeting out of control toward the surface of Epsilon VI and, as Scotty and Spock searched frantically through the manuals trying to find a way to save them all, Kirk vowed, as he stared at the solid blue image filling the main view screen, that never again would he allow a Microsoft operating system to control his ship.