Bluffing the Advance Scout: Difference between revisions

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* An inversion of sorts occurs in "Victory Unintentional" by [[Isaac Asimov]]: Humans send a team of highly advanced robots to negotiate with hostile aliens living on Jupiter. In order to be able to survive in the extremely high gravity, the robots have been built to be extremely strong and durable (the aliens themselves function more like deep sea fish and maintain their internal pressure the same as the outside in order to avoid being crushed). By the end of the story, the aliens surrender to humans, and after some confusion it's realised the humans never told them they were sending robots, leading them to assume that humans are a race of super-powered indestructible metallic beings.

* A short story called "Master Race" had the conquistadorial aliens' mighty armada of miles-long starships flee the Solar System in terror after their scout swiped some comic books from a boy's treehouse and the aliens concluded these were historical records of the awesome powers of humanity.

* In the short story ''Iron Inferno'' from the [[Warhammer ~~40000~~]] anthology ''Fear the Alien'', a Lord General, of the [[Redshirt Army|PDF]] of a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture|conspicuously Japanese system]], made a ploy against the [[Our Orcs Are Different|Waaagh!]] that had just made planetfall. The plan was an elaborate deception to convince a vanguard force that a poorly defended hive was a veritable fortress with many more defenses and men guarding it than there actually were. After a brief battle, the deception had indeed worked, but the Lord General [[My God, What Have I Done?|was horrified]] that his goal [[Gone Horribly Right|met failure]]. Because of his inexperience with Orks, he didn't foresee that not only would they ''not'' avoid a costly and hard-fought battle, but they would ''[[Blood Knight|jump right at it]]''.

* In the short story ''Iron Inferno'' from the [[Warhammer 40,000]] anthology ''Fear the Alien'', a Lord General, of the [[Redshirt Army|PDF]] of a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture|conspicuously Japanese system]], made a ploy against the [[Our Orcs Are Different|Waaagh!]] that had just made planetfall. The plan was an elaborate deception to convince a vanguard force that a poorly defended hive was a veritable fortress with many more defenses and men guarding it than there actually were. After a brief battle, the deception had indeed worked, but the Lord General [[My God, What Have I Done?|was horrified]] that his goal [[Gone Horribly Right|met failure]]. Because of his inexperience with Orks, he didn't foresee that not only would they ''not'' avoid a costly and hard-fought battle, but they would ''[[Blood Knight|jump right at it]]''.

* A story from an old issue of ''Boys' Life'' has a young boy doing this to a team of Martian scouts completely by accident. He's just moved into the neighborhood and thinks the scouts are neighbor kids playing spaceman, and decides to play along. Through a series of [[Contrived Coincidence|contrived coincidences]] he ends accidentally convincing the Martians that that all of humanity is fearless and morally incorruptible, and that humans far outmatch the Martians technologically. In the end the Martians decide to invade another planet.

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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:~~Bluffing the Advance Scout~~]]

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