Batman Gambit/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Batman Gambits in Literature include:

Discworld

  • Vetinari. As Moist reflects: "It was bad enough being a puppet, but then he arranges it so you pull your own strings."
    • In Guards! Guards!, Vetinari specifically set up the deepest, darkest dungeon in his palace so that when he was inevitably thrown in there he'd be in perfect security. The locks are on the inside...
    • Vetinari seems to mix these with other types of The Plan. It's just about impossible to tell which type of gambit he's using in any given situation.
    • In Men at Arms, Vetinari seemingly gives into the demands of the Assassins' and Fools' Guilds by forbidding Vimes from investigating the theft and the string of murders that followed, but he knows full well that doing so will only cause Vimes to redouble his efforts. It briefly backfires on him when he tells Vimes to turn in his badge -- in the middle of a conversation with someone else, he realizes he likely broke Vimes' spirit instead of galvanizing it, because Vimes didn't put his fist in the wall after leaving.
  • Vimes, too, particularly in Night Watch. At one point he wonders whether Vetinari "felt this way all the time".
    • Unlike Vetinari, Vimes actually did know the future. Less of a Batman Gambit, more of a Reverse Cassandra.
  • Lord Rust, in Jingo, illustrates how spectacularly this can go wrong.
  • Death pulls this a few times with his granddaughter Susan. Usually because she can go places and do things that he cannot. See Hogfather and Thief of Time for examples.
  • Minor characters also invoke this trope, as when Glod Glodson from Soul Music needs to speak to the Librarian, and asks some student wizards where "the monkey" is. In hope of seeing Glod pounded into pulp, they lead him there directly, encouraging him to act like a monkey when they get there. Instead, Glod respectfully tells the Librarian that the students just called him a monkey. And muses to himself that they'd have told him to push off if he'd asked about an ape.
    • Could actually qualify as a Xanatos Gambit, as helpful students would've corrected Glod's use of "monkey" to begin with, while the pranksters' response played into his trick.

Harry Potter

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Riddle attacked four students, including one of Harry's best friends, and then kidnapped his best friend's little sister and future Love Interest Ginny Weasley to make Harry go into the Chamber, because he wanted to meet the boy who had defeated his future self, and talk to him. Oh, and kill him too.
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: when Voldemort arranged for Harry to compete in the Triwizard Tournament, what he wanted was not to get him killed in the process, as everyone thought. He wanted Harry to survive all the tasks and win the Tournament, so he could kidnap him and use his blood to regenerate his body. There's also one Batman Gambit that fails: fake-Moody surreptitiously gives Neville the information Harry will need to pass the Second Task, assuming that Harry will ask help from everyone. However, Harry doesn't, so fake-Moody has to find another way of making that information reach Harry.
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Voldemort creates a false vision to trick Harry into believing he has Sirius trapped in the Hall of Prophecy, correctly guessing Harry would go to rescue him, finding the Prophecy instead, which Voldemort's Death Eaters could then steal. Previously, however, there is another failed attempt: Voldemort first just shows Harry where the Prophecy is, believing his curiosity would make him go and get it, but Harry actually doesn't know anything about it, so he doesn't even know what he's seeing.
  • Harry himself pulls off one of these in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: when Ron is having self-esteem problems that get in the way of his Quidditch performance before the first match of the year, Harry makes Hermione and (with her unknowing help) Ron believe that he spiked his pumpkin juice with luck potion, just by trying to "hide" the little bottle, and pointing out some lucky coincidences. Ron, believing that nothing can go wrong that day, plays spectacularly, and then Harry reveals that he did it all by himself. However, it leads to a row between Ron and Hermione that Harry didn't foresee.
  • Basically everything Dumbledore does is part of two huge Batman Gambits: one of these, training Harry and keeping him alive "so that he can die at the right moment" is successful. The other one -- luckily -- fails: a Batman Gambit that would let him die undefeated so the Elder Wand would lose his power, but Draco disarms him, winning the Wand's allegiance. This makes it possible for Harry to become its true Master later and use it to defeat Voldemort. No wonder the last chapter is called "The Flaw in the Plan".

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

  • The absolute master in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms saga is The Strategist Zhuge Liang, though he's also rivaled by fellow chessmasters Sima Yi, Zhou Yu and Pang Tong. One could argue pseudo-villain Cao "That's exactly what I was thinking!" Cao also has his moments of Batman inspiration.
  • And as for the classic example: the "Empty Fortress" strategy employed in the novel by Zhuge Liang when he had to defend a fort against Sima Yi: Zhuge Liang simply opened the gates and played a zither on the wall. Naturally, Sima Yi suspected a trap and retreated, because... Oh, come on, it's Zhuge Freaking Liang! He's got to have a trap somewhere! The fortress really was empty, and it only worked because Zhuge Liang knew that Sima Yi would be naturally suspicious of him.
  • Another incident is where Cao Cao is escaping from the Battle of Red Cliffs, and has to choose between a wider path and a narrow one, with smoke trails coming from the latter. Cao Cao chooses the obviously trap-laden narrow path. His logic? It's one of Zhuge Liang's tricks to keep him on the wide one. He's almost right: Zhuge Liang, knowing that Cao Cao would use that line of reasoning, had set the ambush up on the narrow path.
  • If the traditional tales are to be believed, Zhuge Liang goes so far as to do this to people on his side, including his lord Liu Bei's sworn brother, Zhang Fei. The legend goes that Zhang Fei believed that Liu Bei treated Zhuge Liang, an untested scholar, far too well above his own veteran generals. Zhuge Liang, hearing of this, asked Zhang Fei what could be done to prove himself. Zhang Fei, due to go to a city on business for a day, insisted that Zhuge Liang would be smart enough to predict his next three meals or be dismissed from Liu Bei's service. Zhuge Liang agreed, wrote down his prediction on the spot, and sealed it in a bag, given to Zhang Fei's sworn brother Guan Yu. Zhang Fei went on his task, and upon entering the city, thought that Zhuge Liang would know of his habit for meat and wine, and avoided it, instead eating a local childhood favorite of his, green onions wrapped in fried dough. The next day, he realized that Zhuge Liang would know where he had been raised and what he would have eaten in his youth, and decided to try and fool the strategist by wrapping the fried dough inside the onions instead. Concluding his business, dinner time came and while he was hungry, Zhang Fei again thought of the wager, and Zhuge Liang's cunning. Certain that he could win, he rushed back to Liu Bei's camp, where he found a feast waiting for his return, organized by Zhuge Liang. Zhang Fei tried to claim he'd already eaten, but Zhuge Liang asked Guan Yu to read the prediction.

General Zhang Fei will enter the city but will ignore meat and wine, as that is his normal way, and eat green onions wrapped in dough. The next day he will think to change and win the wager, and eat dough wrapped in green onions. General Zhang Fei will come back not having eaten in the city, and thus have no third meal at all.
If Zhang Fei hadn't overthought it, or just been The Alcoholic Big Eater like usual, he would have won the bet easily.

  • Cao Cao gets one himself at Wuchao granaries. First, Cao Cao undertakes the mother of all False Flag Operations and burns down the food supplies of his rival, Yuan Shao. Yuan Shao responds by reasoning that Cao Cao will have focused everything on the raid, and that his main camp will be weak. So he sends out a force to take out Cao Cao's main camp and cut off the retreat of the raiding force, including Cao Cao himself. At this point, news reaches him that the defending garrison was victorious, and he adds the forces that were meant to reinforce it to the attack on Cao Cao's main camp. This was all according to Cao Cao's plan. The garrison had not held out: the messengers that told Yuan Shao that were Cao soldiers dressed in the stolen uniforms. Cao wanted the force attacking his main camp to be as large as possible: he had an ambush waiting for them and wanted to get as many enemies as possible. Two of Yuan Shao's best generals were forced to surrender when they were completely cut off from their leader.

Other works

  • In Double, Double / The Case of the Seven Murders, part of the villain's plan depends on the detective identifying the pattern and convincing victim #5 he will be next, adding a number of omens to further frighten the superstitious victim, so that he would make out his will to the killer. Subverted in that the killer overdoes it, the victim changes his will again, then everything spirals out of control as another person figures things out, necessitating two more murders.
  • Cathy in East of Eden has a gift for seeing people's weaknesses and the sociopathy needed to manipulate them. It's a repeated theme through the book that she'll mention an idea, it will spread and become other people's beliefs, but no one will remember it originated from her. (Ex:'s The ministed who committed suicide had trouble in Boston, they should jar their own fruits at the whorehouse, etc.)
  • The plan to capture David in Animorphs relies entirely on him behaving the way they expect, as well as him not realizing that Tobias is still alive. At various points, he could have broken character and foiled the plan, but he never does. Marco later attempts this in order to thwart the two Vissers, but this one doesn't go quite as well.
  • In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Hari Seldon basically sets up centuries worth of Batman Gambit in advance, using statistics. Somewhat subverted when it turns out that he actually left behind a secret Second Foundation to keep history working precisely according to his plan.
    • And of course in Second Foundation the eponymous organization pulls off one themselves when they trick the First Foundationers into believing the Second Foundation is on Terminus rather than Trantor.
    • And in the various prequels/sequels it's revealed that the whole thing... including the 10,000 year old Galactic Empire itself... was a millennia-long Batman Gambit by Robot Daneel Olivaw designed to ensure that he could remain operative to protect humanity as a whole.
  • Steven Brust's Jhereg has an unusual take on this; the villain sets up a careful scheme designed to get the protagonist to kill him, under circumstances which will start a bloody war between two noble houses he hates.
    • Considering that Dragaera has an entire Great House of planners in the Yendi, this also gets used in several other books. Particularly notable are Yendi itself, where the Sorceress in Green and Sethra the Younger have been screwing with the internal politics of House Dragon to make sure the latter becomes Warlord when the new Emperor/Empress takes over, and Phoenix, where the Goddess Verra uses Vlad in a plot to try to calm the Teckla uprisings by starting a war with another country to get them to unite against a common enemy. The latter didn't work out very well.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan usually starts out with one of these, then rapidly devolves into Indy Ploys. What makes him good is his amazing ability to convince people that he meant to do that.
    • Miles' protege, Elli Quinn, in a "What would Miles do?" moment says: "Never do yourself, what you can con an expert into doing for you."
      • Miles learned the lesson from an older, female counterpart Cavilo in The Vor Game.

Cavilo: The key to strategy...is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.

        • He furthermore learned from her that making all paths lead to victory only works so long as only one of those paths is taken, convincing him to use his strategy of only picking one stratagem at a time while making everyone believe that he has elaborate interlocking plans.
  • There are a number of examples of Batman Gambits within Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and its sequels. Most of these are done by the protagonists, though one antagonist, Achilles, becomes well known for these. In the final battle of Ender's Game, Ender makes use of the enemy's dual expectations, that no one would ever kill a queen and that humans are rational and will try to survive any battle, as well as the fact that the enemy is distracted trying to manage all of its ships, in order to slip some fighters in close to the planet and destroy both it and the enemy fleets in a single blow. This is a fairly convoluted set of circumstances, all of which are needed for the plan to work, and so it does come near being a Gambit Roulette.
    • Subverted at the end of Shadow Puppets: the super-intelligent Bean correctly intuits that Achilles has him marked down for a Batman Gambit, and asks himself what he (Bean) wouldn't be likely to do. The answer: ignore every negotiating ploy of Achilles's, walk up to him, and pop a cap in him -- which he does.
  • G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown story The Sins of Prince Saradine: Saradine has two enemies, one a blackmailer, and the other seeking revenge. He then gives everything he has to the blackmailer, and informs the other of his location. The avenger kills the blackmailer and willingly accepts execution.
  • Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are almost entirely guided by Lord Foul the Despiser. For example, the first book, Lord Foul's Bane, involves a band of heroes fighting and defeating a mad sorcerer... thus allowing Foul to acquire a powerful artifact that the sorcerer had been guarding.
    • The Chronicles are littered with Batman gambits. The above by Lord Foul the Despiser; Thomas Covenant's plan to give Lord Foul his ring, and thus the power to destroy everything and free himself, Covenant gambling on the assumption that Foul would kill him with it first, and thus leave Covenant in a position to absorb any attack it made on the Arch of Time with his own soul....
  • Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes often uses small-scale Batman Gambits to trap criminals or get information he requires. In the course of the stories, he does everything from plant false reports in the media, to put on disguises, to fake his own death, twice, in order to solve the various cases he handles. He's even gone so far as to lie to and manipulate Watson and his clients if necessary, although usually not in a way that puts them in danger.
    • Backfired in A Scandal in Bohemia when Irene Adler figured out what he had done and who he was.
    • Many of his deductions are a sort of retroactive Batman Gambit: after the fact, he deduces the "only possible way" that characters could have acted and events could have played out. Any number of alternate possibilities always exist, but are never acknowledged.
  • In Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Milady de Winter's ability to pull off Batman Gambits is what makes her formidable -- if she's unable to carry out an assassination she can just get someone else to do it for her. Cardinal Richelieu is the story's specialist.
  • Speaking of Dumas, can we say The Count of Monte Cristo? Oh, yes we can. Dantes got imprisoned due to this trope, and after his escape, he lives and breathes it for the remainder of the book.
    • And it is certainly a series of these gambits since we also get to see several of his gambits run out of control and almost destroy some innocents he wasn't aiming at and had to protect. Resulting in a near breakdown and loss of faith at the end of the book and realizing that he really isn't Providence. Fortunately, his loyal Greek Princess bails him out with a love admission.
  • Everything that happens in Neil Gaiman's American Gods from the first page onwards turns out to have been staged by the gods Loki and Odin -- a.k.a. Low Key Lyesmith and Mr. Wednesday -- right up to, and including, the war between the old and new gods.
  • In Artemis Fowl, the title character ends his encounter with the LEPrecon with a Batman Gambit, using the regulations of the organization to maneuver everything into place for his escape, though he kindly leaves some of the money behind.
    • Or perhaps he had another reason for returning some of the gold...
  • Nearly everything that comes out of the Bene Gesserit from Frank Herbert's Dune, either on an individual or a planetary level, is some form of Batman Gambit, but the Baron Harkonnen proves just as capable of executing one of his own; the course of action that the Duke Leto took to gain Arrakis, which eventually killed him, was the result of the Baron's successful Batman Gambit against him.
    • The Bene Gesserit also throw in a heaping helpful of Crazy Prepared. They set up the Missionaria Protectiva to seed planets with a specific belief system, so that if necessary a Bene Gessirt could use the myths and prophecies to set up their own Batman Gambit as needed.
    • And the Baron's plan only worked because Yueh was executing his own Batman Gambit, knowing the Baron would want to gloat over the Duke's capture gave him the opportunity to equip the Duke with a tool to assassinate the Baron. Plans within plans indeed.
  • In Jamie Malanowski's The Coup, a US Vice-President engineers one of the most brilliant government ousters ever seen. He plays everybody like cards in a deck and does it with such panache that you find yourself cheering for the Magnificent Bastard.
  • Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and its sequels are loaded with these, as Chauvelin uses the tactic (as an attempted Plan) and the title character responds. The entire ending scheme in the original The Scarlet Pimpernel relies on the French buying into their own anti-Semitic tendencies; this is usually dropped from adaptations, such as the musical.
  • K.J. Parker's Engineer trilogy is one big gambit by the title figure, who manipulates nations just so he can go home to his wife and child. Arguably a Gambit Roulette, except that he made use of luck, but could have gotten by without it; "it'd have taken longer and needed a lot more effort, but [he] would have got there in the end."
  • K.J. Parker's Scavenger Trilogy: Ciartan's war on the crows, which is symbolic of the several deep conspiracies which depend on getting inside the head of the enemy.
  • Duke Edmund Talbot's battle strategies in John Ringo's Council Wars series tend to involve this, combined with never telling anyone, even his closest aides and allies, his plans makes it nigh-impossible for his enemies to predict his actions. Which is the whole point.
  • Kelsier and his crew of Mistborn pulled off a terrific Batman Gambit. First, they tricked the noble houses of the main city of Luthadel into fighting each other so that they wouldn't be able to mount a unified defense against rebel forces. Then, Kelsier visits people throughout the city, establishing emotional connections to them, and building his image of a larger than life hero. To reinforce his legend, he mixes in tales of a legendary magical material, which he purports will allow to him to slay the Lord Ruler. To further reinforce this, Kelsier uses his magic to empower a common soldier. In secret, Kelsier gathers arms and armor for those in the city. Finally, when the army is distracted with the rebel army, thus drawing them away from the city, Kelsier produces a public spectacle in the city square and is promptly killed. But, you see, his death was part of the plan. Spurred by the death of their favored hero, the commoners of Luthadel rise up and depose the authorities, thus allowing the main heroine the opportunity needed to take out the Big Bad. Which she does.
    • And that's just the first book in the trilogy. The second two continue on in this tradition.
  • Bram Stoker's original novel Dracula, where the Count's master plan to infiltrate England and spread his vampire curse was only foiled by the Deus Ex Machina of asylum doctor John Seward just happening to be the former student of Professor Van Helsing, the only person who'd recognise a vampire attack and know exactly what to do. Dracula's meticulous setup and coverup of his lairs and his later manipulation of Mina as a weapon against his pursuers was only matched by Van Helsing's counter-plan of hypnotising her to deduce the Count's location.
  • JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: as explained on the What an Idiot! page, Gandalf used one of these to distract Sauron from the true location of the One Ring, convincing him that Aragorn had the Ring and was planning to use it against him. Of course, the whole thing was a diversion to allow the hobbits to enter Mordor unnoticed.
    • This becomes the basis of the free people's entire strategy after Pippin looks into the palantir, premised entirely on the assumption that Sauron would assume that his enemies would try to use the ring against him rather than try to destroy it.
    • Sauron has one that fails big time in The Silmarillion. In it, the Numenoreans (think Atlanteans) march on Sauron with such a massive force that Sauron's minions flee and he's captured. Of course, being the master manipulator that Sauron is, he goes from prisoner to advisor to the king in only a few years. As the king is near death's door, Sauron manipulates him into making war on Valinor, the land of the Valar (minor gods, essentially). The plan was simple, trick the Numenoreans into attacking Valinor so Sauron could watch them die spectacularly. He didn't anticipate that the Valar would lay down their power before Iluvatar (God), and ask him for aid. Iluvatar made the world round, made Valinor inaccessible except to certain individuals (namely the elves), and sunk Numenor into the sea. Sauron didn't even see it coming, and was swallowed under the ocean. When he emerged, he could no longer take a pleasing form again.
      • It certainly backfired due to Sauron underestimating the opposition, but later in the mythos he seems to consider his fair form a worthy trade for the destruction of his only real competition for world domination.
      • As a rule, Sauron is actually quite good at the Batman Gambit himself, using his foe's psychological weaknesses against them quite a bit during the second and third ages: using the elves' desire to keep and preserve middle earth to goad them into forging the rings and giving him valuable pointers on ring forging while they were at it, using the lust for power of the kings of Middle Earth to get them to accept his rings of power and become the Nazgul (he was less successful with the elves and dwarves), using the Numenorian's fears of death and resentment of elven and Valar immortality to goad the Numenorians into a suicidal assault on Valinor, using Saruman and Denethor's desire to scry his plans via the palantir to push both past the Despair Event Horizon, driving Saruman into a Face Heel Turn. He doesn't always get it right, but Sauron's frighteningly good at playing his enemies like violins. It's only when he's beaten at his own game by Gandalf and Aragorn that he's finally defeated.
  • Nobody does it like Jeeves and Wooster. He plays a blinder at the end of Right Ho, Jeeves, persuading Bertie to creep out at night and ring the fire bell, so that in the ensuing panic Tuppy Glossop's first instinct will be to rescue Angela Travers, and Gussie Fink-Nottle's to rescue Madeleine Basset, thereby rekindling their love. Jeeves's real plan is darker: he knows that the party will be unable to get back into the house, that the smouldering Aunt Dahlia will order Bertie to bicycle nine miles to fetch the key, that it will be their mutual exasperation with Bertie that will reunite the lovers ... and, finally, that this will be the ideal time for him to 'accidentally' burn Bertie's unsuitable mess jacket while ironing it. Head and shoulders, he stands above the rest.
  • In Timothy Zahn's Star Wars Expanded Universe books, this is the essence of most of Grand Admiral Thrawn's strategies - he's very, very good at predicting his enemies. He can work out what species is leading an attack from the way they fly, and target his counterattack against their cultural or genetic blind spots. He sets up a power struggle within the New Republic just by understanding Bothan psychology. And he is able to understand the psychology of any species simply by studying their art. His Watsons and Commander Contrarians argue with him and his tactics until it really sinks in that he's just that good. For all intents and purposes, he's basically Sherlock Holmes, military commander In Space! He's also the only villain in the Expanded Universe to anticipate the heroes' Crazy Enough to Work tendencies - when the New Republic is given the choice between attacking a moderately defended Imperial planet and one of the Empire's biggest military bases, and gives every indication that they intend to attack the former, he predicts they'll attack the latter because they're used to doing crazy things the enemy won't expect. He's right. Everyone on the New Republic side is shocked.
    • Outbound Flight. Ready? * deep breath* Commander Thrawn of the Chiss Expansion Defense Fleet has three Corellians in custody, and he's learned about the Republic and how to speak Basic from them. He's got his eye on the nomadic Vagaari, a slave-taking people that's coming close to threatening his own people, and steals a gravity generator from them. His own people, the Chiss, are getting increasingly disapproving of him and his tactics. A Trade Federation taskforce shows up, he curb-stomps it and captures the remains, including many droids, and is convinced by the Trade Federation captain to stop Outbound Flight, a potential threat to his people. Even if Outbound Flight goes on, they may run into something vastly worse, letting the far-outsiders learn too much about the peoples closer to the center of the galaxy. What does he do?
    • He causes one of the Corellians to fear that they are hostages. The Corellian steals a shuttle, unwittingly taking some Trade Federation battle droids, and flees into Vagaari hands. The Vagaari are pleased with the droids, lock the Corellian into Human Shield position with the other captives on the outsides of their ships, and head directly towards the Chiss base. They are brought out of hyperspace by the stolen gravity generator, which is already being used to pin down Outbound Flight. The Jedi on Outbound Flight get immediately threatened by the Vagaari, so they do a mind-whammy on them, carefully not touching the captives. The droids inside of the ship shoot the Vagaari high command, knocking out the Jedi who are in mental contact with them, while the droid starfighters buzz the ships, firing between the captives.
  • Another Timothy Zahn example comes from The Icarus Hunt. Pilot Jordan McKell pulls off a pair to out a murderer and pull off a spectacular Undercover Cop Reveal.
  • This is done in the later Honor Harrington novels where Honor and her detachment are sent to do rear-area strikes to force Haven to redeploy their attack fleet to defend against her numerically inferior technologically advanced threat. They succeed, but unfortunately for Honor succeed so well they manage to trap her entire fleet.
  • This is basically how Gabriel Lafayette and Easy Mather's scheme works in Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, and, according to the book, how psychics in general work, albeit on a far less grandiose scale.
  • Depending on how you interpret it (and there are more than a few ways to do so), the plot of Milton's Paradise Lost could be one of these, designed to give humankind the knowledge of good and evil, knowing that Satan would try to mess thing up by doing the opposite of whatever he thought God intended.
  • In Juliet Marillier's Heir to Sevenwaters, the plot is structured around a quest to retrieve a missing baby which turns out to be engineered by the villain to lure his son into a trap, since he knew that the kidnapping would make the baby's older sister go after him, and that the son would accompany his love interest.
  • Henry organizes one of these in The Secret History, in his plans for Bunny's murder and, later, the main characters' staying out of jail. This involves relying on his knowledge of his friends' habits and weaknesses to get them to do exactly what he wants them to do. He also uses this to lay the blame on other people, like Cloke Rayburn--but Richard is horrified when he finds out that Henry came very close to giving his name to the FBI.
  • For Arsène Lupin, the Hollow Needle mystery was pretty much all a Batman Gambit at the expense of the young amateur detective Isidore Beautrelet. Numerous others happen throughout Lupin's adventures but this is pretty much the biggest one.
  • The Moth-kinden of Shadows of the Apt, being an entire race of Manipulative Bastards, pull a rather nice one of these. The inhabitants of Tharn know The Empire's going to annex them at some point; not being a warlike people, they gamble everything on getting one particular man installed as Governor, as just about the only Wasp who's Inapt -- like all Moths. Their agents have already got to him and cut a deal: if the Moths teach him magic, he'll let them get on with their lives as if the Empire had never even noticed them.
  • Halo: Ghosts of Onyx has some insurgents deliberately letting ONI learn of their nuclear weapons stockpile so that they can set a trap. It almost works too, if not for the insurgents not knowing about Kurt's near-prescience.
  • Basically everything Belisarius Series does is either an Indy Ploy or a brilliant Batman Gambit. One of his more notable? A half-year long military campaign which he planned to lose, so that the advancing enemy army would continue pursuing part of his army past where another part of his army was concealed, allowing them to slip away with a unit of formed enemy troops the Malwa had assumed was annihilated the previous year, showing up in a completely different part of Persia disguised as ordinary prisoners of the "enemy unit", pull of a Trojan Horse attack that in one blow destroys logistical base of the Malwa in Persia while he sails off in a fleet of ships his wife had organized, resulting in the greatest military defeat in world history up to that point to a Malwa army 10 times the size of his...and not the one he was originally fighting. Because he wanted that Malwa army, its commander, and their "defeating" Belisarius" in battle to be considered the only good part of the whole situation by the Malwa.
  • Lucretia from |Bystander admits that most of her problems in the main storyline are a result of her novice attempts at this.
    • To clarify, her actual gambits mostly work, but she didn't do much as far as planning for a way to stop a reprisal.
  • The short story "The Man At the Table" by C.B. Gilford features an unusual example of this trope. Byron Duquay is sitting at a card table, preparing for guests, when an escaped killer, Rick Masden, enters his home. Duquay convinces Masden to sit at the opposite end of the table for a drink. Masden demands money and the keys to Duquay's car. Duquay says he will give Masden neither, and then proceeds to tell him that if Masden attempts to get up with his knife, Duquay will upend the table on him and grab his own, larger knife. Masden is clearly less muscular than Duquay, and at a disadvantage in a physical fight. Masden quickly realizes that Duquay was expecting company, and that Duquay is trying to delay him until help can arrive, which Duquay admits calmly. They reach an arrangement where Masden will leave his knife behind and leave empty-handed. It is just then that the other guests arrive, and Masden is apprehended. In a Crowning Moment of Awesome we learn that delaying Masden wasn't Duquay's real gambit. Bluffing him into thinking that he could and would fight Masden was. Duquay was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to stand. His wife had placed him in the chair earlier so he would feel like less of an invalid when playing cards with his friends.
  • It's looked for a while like in The Dresden Files Harry's mother set one into motion before her death that would lead her sons to find each other, Harry to get useful information from her when it would most benefit him, and the downfall of the vampire who killed her. It could also be said that Gentleman Johnny Marcone Batman Gambits off Harry's predictable hero tendencies.
  • In the Gaunts Ghosts novel His Last Command Gaunt wanted the inquisitors and senior commissars to learn about the Chaos portals, so he deliberately acted in a suspicious manner that Ludd would report.
  • Saint Dane in the Pendragon series is a master Batman Gambiter; most of his plans are Batman gambits. In fact, he once pulls off a double gambit: the characters realize that he's pulling one of these off, but that itself was what he wanted!
  • In the Star Trek: Typhon Pact novel Rough Beasts of Empire, the Tzenkethi manipulate Romulan politics so as to become an unofficial leading power in the Typhon Pact. The Romulans are the most powerful faction, but are currently led by somewhat hawkish leaders; this threatens the galactic stability seemingly desired by the Tzenkethi. In order to "reign in" the Romulans without drawing attention to themselves or damaging the Romulans' actual strength (which serves the Pact well), they conspire to remove the current Romulan leader and install a Praetor they'd prefer be in power - all through subtle manipulation (and a few assassinations disguised as natural causes). This gambit is played out as Praetor Tal'aura works on her own; to reclaim the breakaway worlds of Donatra's Imperial Romulan State by framing Donatra for a supposed attack on Ambassador Spock, then arresting her when she accepts an invite to a diplomatic conference on Romulus. The latter gambit is playing into the former, as a reunited Romulan state benefits the Typhon Pact and thus is in the best interests of the Tzenkethi.
  • A fully-justified humdinger of one is pulled off in James P. Hogan's The Multiplex Man. In a World Twenty Minutes Into the Future where East and West have exchanged ideologies, a terminally-ill scientist researching Neural Implanting is trying to escape "The Green Curtain" and defect to the free East. But after a close-call with a Super Soldier the corrupt American government created with his research, he realizes he won't survive the night. So, he imprints himself in the super soldier's Neuro Vault minutes before he dies. Once in the super soldier, he incinerates his corpse and send an encrypted communication to his allies detailing how create a Linked-List Clue Methodology which will lead the super-soldier to a place where he can be retrieved from the soldier's Neuro Vault. It works out perfectly because the super soldier is nothing more than a program, and thus the scientist is able to tailor the clues to be irresistible to it.
  • In the Dragonlance novel "Dragons of Spring Dawning" Kitiara pulls one on Laurana, when she uses Laurana's love for Tanis Half-Elven to manipulate the elfmaid into getting herself captured.
  • Everything {{Tavi Codex Alera}} does. Ever. At all. He's this trope so through and through that other characters pull a Batman Gambit on the premise of Tavi pulling a Batman Gambit.
  • Stan Liddell, schoolmaster in The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall, tries to pull a Batman Gambit in order to see if any of his schoolboys are responsible for the theft of a working machine gun from a crashed German bomber. He tells them all to write an essay on their war souvenir collections, hoping that someone will let something slip. Chas McGill takes advantage of the ploy to divert suspicion from himself to rival collector Boddser Brown.
  • The entirety of the Iron Warriors short story "The Beast of Calth" is Honsou pulling one of these on the Imperial forces between him and his goal.
  • In The Age of Innocence, May Archer is determined to end the "affair" (it's merely emotional, not physical, as everyone assumes) between her husband Newland and her cousin Ellen. So she tells her cousin that she's pregnant--even though she isn't certain that she is--knowing that her cousin will react appropriately. Sure enough, Ellen cuts all ties to Newland and flees to Europe. Later, as Newland hints at leaving May to pursue Ellen, May tells him she's pregnant, though by this time, she's sure that she is. What adds to the cleverness of the gambit is that May is consistently presented as superficial and clueless, yet proves herself to be much smarter than anyone realizes.
  • High Priestess D'ol Falla does this in the Green-Sky Trilogy. Her whole plan to free the people of Erda, trapped underground for centuries, hinges on three young priests not letting the power and glory of their position keep them from feeling basic human decency.
Back to Batman Gambit
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Batman_Gambit/Literature?oldid=2025795"