Randall Garrett: Difference between revisions
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'''Randall Garrett''' (1927 - 1987) was a prolific SF author and inveterate punster, who wrote under a bewildering variety of pen names, including David Gordon, Lou Tabakow, Ivar Jorgenson, Darrel T. Langart<ref>(an anagram of his own name)</ref>, Jonathan Blake MacKenzie, S. M. Tenneshaw, and Gordon Aghill, as well as his own name. He claimed to need the pseudonyms so that magazine editors could publish more than one of his stories in a single issue. In one two-year period, he sold over eighty stories, many in collaboration with [[Robert Silverberg]].
He was a founding member of the [[Society for Creative Anachronism]].
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* the [[Lord Darcy]] stories▼
* ''Takeoff!'' and ''Takeoff! Too'', which includes "Backstage Lensman"
▲* [[Lord Darcy]]
* the Psi-Power trilogy (with Laurence Janifer, as "Mark Phillips")
* the Nidor series (with [[Robert Silverberg]], as "Robert Randall")
* the Gandalara Cycle (with Vicki Ann Heydron)
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* [[Bilingual Dialogue]]: Played for laughs in "Backstage Lensman". Sir Houston Carbarn is the most brilliant mathematical physicist in the known universe; one of only a handful of living entities who can actually think in the language of pure mathematics.
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The Starboard Admiral slammed his palm against the desk. "Of course! The principle of the double negative! Two negaspheres make a posisphere! Our Gray Lensman has genius, Sir Houston!"
"?" 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.
** The Nipe in "Anything You Can Do" gets persuaded that the humans it's met on Earth are ruled by a race of supermen living in the asteroid belt.
* [[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!
* [[Geas]]: The theme of "Nor Iron Bars a Cage".
* [[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.
* [[I Want My Jetpack]]: Spoofed in "The Masters of the Metropolis", which describes any everyday modern journey as if it were a scenario from a fifty-year-old futurism piece:
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* [[Lie Detector]]: Featured in "The Best Policy".
* [[Market-Based Title]]: The three parts of the Psi-Power trilogy were titled "That Sweet Little Old Lady", "Out Like a Light", and "Occasion for Disaster" when first published in ''[[Analog]]''; when they were republished in book form they were renamed ''Brain Twister'', ''The Impossibles'', and ''Supermind''.
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