Randall Garrett: Difference between revisions

"?" agreed Sir Houston. }}

* [[Bluffing the Advance Scout]]: In "The Best Policy", alien advance scouts kidnap a human, stick him in a lie detector, and order him to describe Earth. He manages to give them a description in which every sentence is technically true, but the overall effect is a misleading picture of humans who possess immense, even supernatural powers, and the aliens are frightened off.

* [[Crazy Sane]]: Miss Thompson, the title character of "That Sweet Little Old Lady". The only known telepath who is neither catatonic nor a gibbering wreck, she is not only ''compos mentis'', she's arguably the sanest and most sensible character in the book -- except that she's unshakeably convinced that she's a 400-year-old immortal who used to be [[The Virgin Queen|Queen Elizabeth I]].

* [[Fantasy Contraception]]: In the Gandalara Cycle, the women of a [[Human Subspecies]] are completely aware of their own fertility.

* [[Feghoot]]: Randall invented his own variant, where the final line would be a pun on the name of another science fiction writer.

* [[Future Slang]]: "Backstage Lensmen" dials up the future slang common in the ''Lensman'' series to the point where none of the characters actually understand each other. QX, Chief!

* [[Horse of a Different Color]]: In the Gandalara Cycle, the only animals big enough to ride are [[Sapient Steed|presentient]] and [[Bond Creatures|telepathic]] pantherids called ''sha'um'' (which translates to "great cat").

* [[Humans Are Cthulhu]]: The [[H.P. Lovecraft]] takeoff "The Horror Out of Time" starts off as apparently a typical Lovecraftian tale of a first-person narrator having a mind-bending encounter amidst prehistoric ruins, but it eventually becomes clear that narrator is not human, and that the human race is the horrible creatures depicted on the walls of the ruins.