Last year, we gave you our favorite opening sentences from science fiction novels — but when we decided to do the same thing for endings, it turned out to be harder to find as many great ones, until we did a bit more digging. Why are great endings rarer than great beginnings?

In some ways, a great opening line is easier than a great last line. Everybody understands the need to draw the reader in, to craft a beginning that both seduces and informs the uncommitted. A first line gives you hints of what the story will be about, but also establishes a tone. But a last line has to wrap up the last bits of story, leave you with as much closure as the writer wants you to have, and give a feeling of a final grace note. And a lot of science fiction novels seem to end with a bang, or a last order of business, or a final thought — but a line that wraps things up, storywise, and leaves you with a sense that the story continues, past the horizon? That's a tad rarer.

So we spent hours sitting in various bookstores and our own book collections, rifling through the science fiction books to find the last lines that stay with you after you've put the book down. (I sat on the floor of a Border's for a couple hours. Shudder.) And here's what we came across, including a few fantasy ones as well. (Special thanks to Alexis Brown, who devoted tons of time to the search for the perfect final note.)

It goes without saying, there may be spoilers here. (Although perhaps not surprisingly, many of the best last lines are the ones which give the least away, because they do the least plot wrangling.) Also, we're cheating slightly, in some cases, and giving you the last paragraphs of novels, rather than just the last sentence. So here are our favorites:

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly:

"Stooping Down, Bruce picked one of the stubbled blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, sliping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving." It's a lovely surreal ending to a weird, unsettling book, and the blue plant that Bruce puts in his shoe is one of the seedlings of the mysterious drug Substance D. What's he going to do with it? I love the fact that in a novel about surveillance and fractured personas we have to be told, at the last, that nobody can see inside Bruce's mind.

Matthew De Abaitua, Red Men:

"She moved on to the question of what she would dream about, if she could decide on a good dream before going to sleep, and if the dream would obey her wishes and stay good all through the night." Another novel about fractured psyches and surveillance and people confronting their dark side, and it ends with a child's wish to control her own dreams — and we linger on how simple, and yet how difficult, that actually is.

Iain M. Banks, Against A Dark Background:

"A little later the monowheel vehicle spun backward out of the sewer outfall, pirrouetted vertically like a saluting mount, swung down across the greasy slope of stones at the base of the House's walls, dodged uncoordinated gunfire from a nearby tower, and accelerated quickly across the tide-flooding sands." Jesus. Read that aloud. It's a poem. And the imagery is so vivid, you can see the monowheel's dance, in your head. It's epic.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere:

"And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway." It's interesting how many of these last lines are a literal departure, into darkness or into the void. Anyway, it's a really haunting last sentence.

William Barton, When Heaven Fell:

"Then the pipers piped and the drummers drummed and we all marched away into the sky." The main character is fighting in the alien army that conquered the human race, and they finally may have found an even more powerful enemy to go fight. I just love the ring of "marched away into the sky." Why isn't William Barton worshiped as a god, again?

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow:

"Unaware of his own movement, schooled by old habit, Vincenzo Giuliani rose and went to the windows, and stood looking, for how long he had no idea, across a grassy open courtyard to a complex panorama of medieval masonry and jumbled rock, formal garden and gnarled trees: a scene of great and beautiful antiquity." It's a wonderfully melancholy last sentence for a novel that ends with dreadful sadness and contemplation of almost unimaginable brutality. The universe is even older, and even harsher, than anything we have on Earth, and yet there's beauty as well.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition:

"She kisses his sleeping back and falls asleep." Supposedly it's a major taboo to begin a novel with a character waking up, but in this case, ending a novel with falling asleep, especially after a kiss, just feels right.

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother:

"She kissed me then, and I kissed her back, and it was some time before we went out for that burrito." It's like the end of a Roger Moore James Bond movie, where he's finally in bed with the main girl, and we pan back slowly, giving them some privacy for their much-deserved nookie. Except Doctorow's version is funnier, and the burrito thing is a nice callback to the crucial burrito scene earlier in the book.

The Killing of Worlds (Succession, Book 2) by Scott Westerfeld:

"A kiss could change the world." Another kiss, and this one full of hope that the personal can have a transforming effect on the universe.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451:

"When we reach the city." Super short, but one of the most discussed last lines in literature, for its possible religious symbolism among other things. It's inspired a whole blog.

Charles Stross, Saturn's Children:

"And none of them need fear being eaten by memories of Rhea." I just love the "eaten by memories" thing.

Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation:

"The Vibe doesn't say a word, for it's been done with him for years; but in his daughter's breathing, the calls of birds from the vines draped over branches, the thickening sky talking about the rain, the insects landing with rustles and whispers on their faces and hands, the ruts in the road that connect La Paz with his wife sleeping on the warping porch at the edge of the ravine, he thinks he hears the answer." One last rolling boulder of a sentence from this thundering novel, that leaves you wondering just what that answer might be.

Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner, Juggler of Worlds:

"In the skies over Atlantis, two suns were gone." And if that doesn't leave an image in your mind after you close the book, there's no helping you.

Frank Herbert, Dune:

"Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine-never to know the moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chai, we who carry the name of the concubine-history will call us wives." Both Alexis and I picked this one out separately — it's just such a great chunk of intrigue. Although I was torn between this one and Children of Dune, which ends with another great quote: "One of us had to accept the agony, and he was always the strongest."

The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds:

"'Dreams,' Demikhov said. 'Beautiful human dreams.'" It's actually really hard to end a novel on a line of dialogue without feeling hokey or as though the interplay of dialogue and narration is just stopping, but Reynolds does it amazingly well.

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time:

"But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone." It's just so fairytale-like, with the nice use of "for" and the gust of wind. And the mystery lingering after you close the back cover.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games:

"I take his hand, holding tightly, preparing for the cameras, and dreading the moment when I will finally have to let go." One of our favorite books of the past year, and it ends with the greatest test yet to begin. And "let go" has so many different meanings here, it's amazing.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx And Crake:

"Zero Hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go." You can see why this book is getting a sequel, since that's another ending that feels like a beginning.

Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End:

"No one dared disturb him or interrupt his thoughts; and presently he turned his back upon the dwindling sun." Another one that both Alexis and I picked out separately, for its image of the sun dying away.

Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon:

"We moved on through the cavern to the stairs where the dead men lay and went round and round above him in the dark." Another one which ends with a sense of motion and departure, with the narrator leaving into the dark.

Otherland Volume Three: Mountain of Black Glass by Tad Williams:

"She learned on the balcony railing, waiting for the end of the world." There are some last lines that would also make great first lines, and this is definitely one of them.

H.G. Wells, War Of The Worlds:

"And strangest of all is it to hold my wife's hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead." It makes me want to go back and re-read that book right now.

George Orwell, 1984:

"He loved Big Brother." You can't get much sharper, darker, or bleaker than that final statement.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein:

"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." Another last line that's a departure, and that features someone disappearing into the darkness, in a poetic, haunting way.

Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End:

"Then he was down the elevator and back on the sunny plaza. And hovering immanent all around him were the worlds of art and science that humankind was busy building. What if I can have it all?" Of all the endings we looked through, this is the one that felt the most cinematic, for some reason. You can just feel the camera panning back to show the future being built and the big question hovering in the air.

Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible:

"When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a super-charged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world." More books should suddenly veer into second person, as if this is all of us going on this journey of vengeance together — it just amps up the awful power of that last evil oath.

Ken MacLeod, The Sky Road:

"Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written." The image of conquest, culminating with the blank, black flag, is just so rich and hangs around long after you put the book down.

Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue:

"One of the things he planned to do, before he left this fancy hell, was figure out how to get into the Interface and go for a swim with those whales in that beautiful blue water. Round and round and round, in a lovely endless loop." Another really sticky image, this one a bit surreal and full of color.

Top image is cover of The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod, art by Mark Salwowski. Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

In William Barton's books, the strong exploit the weak — until someone stronger comes along, and exploits them in turn. And the universe rattles on, uncaring. As a character says in Alpha Centauri by Barton and Capobianco, it's do or die — and even if you do, you'll still die anyway. Oh well.

My favorite William Barton novel is probably When Heaven Fell, where a cybernetic Master Race takes over Earth and kills eight billion humans. The rest become slaves, soldiers, or mercenaries like the novel's hero Athol Morrison. Athol comes back to Earth after twenty years away, and finds that his high school sweetheart is involved in helping to plan an uprising against the alien overlords. Morrison knows the uprising will probably fail, and then the aliens will retaliate, wiping out what's left of the human race. So after much dithering, he rats out the human resistance to the aliens, in exchange for saving his girlfriend's life.

Later, he gets involved with a more sophisticated resistance effort involving a number of subjugated races. But it seems pretty doomed as well, and in the novel's final twist, we learn that the Master Race didn't come to Earth seeking new realms to conquer — they came here fleeing an even stronger, meaner empire from Andromeda. And now the people who kicked the Master Race's ass are coming to our galaxy. The Master Race will be conquered, and humans will probably end up "the slaves of slaves." (He cites the historical precedent of the Huns smashing the Roman Empire, when the Huns were actually fleeing the stronger Chinese.)

The weirdest Barton novel may well be Acts Of Conscience, where the hero (?) Gaetan comes across a planet whose inhabitants include a race called dollies, who happen to be perfectly suited to be sex toys for humans. The Dollies are furry and cute, and look sort of like little girls, but they also secrete hormones that spark arousal in human males. A group of humans want to round up all the Dollies and ship them off to be used by humans, which will wipe out the species in the process. In the most nauseating scene, Gaetan struggles with his conscience (and the nagging voice of his spacesuit) — and then he goes ahead and has sex with a dollie anyway:

Dollie looking up at me out of empty, featureless eyes, as though waiting. I put my hand on its belly, petting soft fur, felt it squirm with what seemed like pleasure, listened to its resumed purr. A cat, they say, does not purr out of pleasure. Humans don't care why it purrs, merely make the assumptions that please them most.

No reason to do this. You're just full of alien pheromones, pheromones tricking your reproductive physiology into thinking... hell. Think of it like a nice drug. Like a masturbation aid. Like the vidnet girls. Just get your dick out and take care of yourself, that's all. No one will know but you and the dollies. Who would they tell? Who would care? ...

The spacesuit whispered, Gaetan.

Shut the fuck up. Go away.

I crawled on top of the dollie and just like that, I was in. Wet. Warm. Sticky like raw egg white. Just like a woman. That's it. In. Out. In. Out. The dollie looked up at my face as I fucked it, eyes like bits of glass, purring steadily away, as if I were still only . . .

And after he's done basically raping an alien life form, he starts to cry. (Although I get the impression the dollie doesn't think of what just happened as sex.) And later he finally decides to save the dollies, and the other intelligent life forms on the planet whom the humans have exploited and killed for entertainment. Even if it dooms the human race (at the hands of a vastly more advanced life form) in the process. The scene where the aliens beg for his help is typically cynical. Writes Barton: "How does it feel to be bargaining with the devil? For that matter, how does it feel to be the devil with whom the downtrodden must bargain?"

Since the 1990s, Barton hasn't published any more novels, but his stories still appear in Asimov's Science Fiction and other magazines. With the explosion of new publishers like Nightshade and Pyr, putting out new books by other neglected greats like Richard Kadrey, I can't help but hope we'll see another searingly bitter Barton epic again soon.

I'm a huge sucker for novels that take place after an alien invasion of Earth has already succeeded. (Actually, the only other novel along those lines I can think of is the criminally neglected When Heaven Fell by William Barton.) In Meyer's novel, a race of parasites/symbionts has succeeded in taking over almost every human on Earth. (They're sort of like the Trill from Star Trek, or the parasites from the recent Nicole Kidman vehicle Invasion. Just like the Body Snatchers, The Host's "souls" took over via subterfuge, until they were unstoppable.

And in line with some other mind-controlling parasite stories, the "souls" are much more peaceful than humans. They abhor violence and are incapable of lying. After the souls take over, murder and rape become unknown and child molesters line up to turn themselves in. (In a hilarious sequence towards the end of the book, we learn the souls' television programs are completely dull, and even The Brady Bunch turned out to be too violent for them to watch.)

What makes the "souls" (and yes, the names are among the cheese-markers in Meyer's novel) so interesting is that they don't always take over their host bodies completely. Older hosts, who are aware of the alien invaders, can resist even after the parasites are implanted. The novel's main character, Wanderer, gets implanted into the body of one of the few human resistance fighters, Melanie. And then Wanderer and Melanie have to struggle for control over Melanie's body, before becoming uneasy friends.

And even when the "souls" manage to eradicate all trace of the consciousness of their bodies' original owners, they still cling to old habits. The newly "ensouled" bodies live in the same houses as before, stay married to the same people (also occupied by "souls") and often keep the same jobs. It's like that Roald Dahl story about the birds that switch places with the people, living in the people's houses and carrying on their routines while the people watch, helpless, from the trees.

One of my problems with The Host was the fact that it made the transition from "struggling for control" to "uneasy friends" way, way too quickly. Wanderer soon becomes obsessed with Melanie's boyfriend and kid brother, both of whom are still parasite-free and hiding out in some caves with a group of resisters. Wanderer relives Melanie's memories and falls in love with Jared, the man Melanie loves. Instead of accessing Melanie's mind to help the "souls" track down the human resisters, Wanderer starts identifying with them.

As I said, Meyer rushes over Wanderer's change of heart, because Meyer is much, much more interested in what happens when Wanderer/Melanie manages to join the human resistance fighters. (Where Wanderer is in constant danger of being killed, and does get roughed up pretty horribly a few times.)

Will Jared, the man both Wanderer and Melanie love, ever accept the parasite in the body of his girlfriend? Is it really Melanie's body, and not either of her warring consciousnesses, that really responds to Jared, because of pheromones and chemical attractions? When Jared finally does show affection to Melanie's body, will Melanie be able to get over her jealousy of Wanderer receiving some of that attention?

Yes, as the book-jacket copy puts it, this is the first ever love triangle involving only two bodies. And weirdly, a trashy romance turns out to be the perfect vehicle for exploring issues of bodies and identity. Do we exist beyond our physical selves? Are our desires just our bodies? How can Wanderer convince the suspicious humans that she still has Melanie's consciousness alive within her? Is it fair for Wanderer to have sex using Melanie's body, while Melanie watches powerlessly? (Melanie only rarely manages to control her own body after Wanderer takes over.)

The book's silly romance subpot winds up politicizing Wanderer, turning her into a race traitor who helps the humans to rescue others from the parasites' mental occupation. We're told, over and over, that what makes humans special is that we have such strong emotions, as compared with the mostly bland-sounding dolphins, bats and cacti that the parasites have occupied before. It's hinted that raw emotion may eventually save the human race from being erased forever (maybe in the inevitable sequel.)

Without giving away The Host's ending, I will mention that it's a bit disappointing. A threat that's been looming since the start of the book gets resolved way too easily, so that Meyer can get back to the romance that actually interests her. And then Wanderer faces a dilemma whose solution is obvious, but which nobody discovers for a few dozen pages. But even if raw plot isn't exactly Meyer's strong suit, the novel's soapy storyline will have you arguing with your friends about the mind/body dichotomy and colonial occupations for days.