Randall Garrett

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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[1], 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.

    Works written by Randall Garrett include:
    • the Lord Darcy stories
    • Takeoff! and Takeoff! Too, which includes "Backstage Lensman"
    • 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)
    Randall Garrett provides examples of the following tropes:
    • 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.

    Sir Houston Carbarn smiled. "(-1)(-1) = +1," he informed.
    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.
    • 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 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 presentient and 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:

    Threading his way through the crowds which thronged the vaulted interior of the terminal, he came to a turnstile, an artifact not unlike a rimless wheel, whose spokes revolved to allow his passage. He placed a coin in the mechanism, and the marvelous machine -- but one of the many mechanical marvels of the age -- recorded his passage on a small dial and automatically added the value of this coin to the total theretofore accumulated. All this, mind, without a single human hand at the controls!

    • 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.
    • Napoleon Delusion: The title character of "That Sweet Little Old Lady" believes herself to be Queen Elizabeth I.
    • Never Found the Body: Invoked by the central character in "The Highest Treason"; facing death or capture, he arranges his death so that no body will be found, deliberately to promote a belief that he somehow got away and one day he'll be back.
    • Political Correctness Gone Mad: In "The Highest Treason", humanity has eliminated all forms of discrimination, resulting in a society where you cannot say that one man can be better than another in anything, promotion is strictly according to age, and that society is quickly losing a war against aliens.
    • Sonic Stunner: The "supersonic whistle" weapon in "The Hunting Lodge".
    • Terrible Ticking: As explained in "That Sweet Little Old Lady", telepaths invariably go mad from the voices. Most of them wind up comatose or raving -- the one notable exception being the little old lady of the title, who would be able to easily pass for sane if she didn't keep confiding in people that she's actually Queen Elizabeth I.
    • "Three Laws"-Compliant: Garrett played around with Asimov's famous three laws in Unwise Child.
    • Tomato Surprise: "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" appears at first to be a standard bit of Space Opera, until the final paragraph reveals an important detail the narrator has up to that point been working hard to conceal.
    1. ↑ (an anagram of his own name)
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