Talk:Randall Garrett

Untitled

One wonders why there is no mention of the fantasy series, "The Gandalara Cycle" with Garrett's name on it, but actually written by his wife, Vicki Ann Heydron.

For that matter, someone should create an entry for her, as well.

Pgranzeau 14:49, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Pseudonyms?

A well-known reference book -- Crime Fiction, 1749-1980: A Comprehensive Bibliography, by Allen J. Hubin, Garland, 1984, ISBN 0 8240 9219 8 -- cites both Murder and Magic and Too Many Magicians as having been written by Larry M(ark) Harris and Randall (Phillips) Garrett and that Randall Garrett is their joint pseudonym. To be honest, I can't quite believe this, having never heard of these books being a collaborative effort, but at the same time, Hubin is so exhaustively encyclopedic and well-known for being thorough and accurate that I find it hard to disbelieve as well. Hubin also apparently notes that the two men write as "Mark Phillips" and that "Laurence M. Janifer" is a pseudonym for Larry M(ark) Harris. Trying to trace back the pseudonyms seems to result in a kind of Ourobouros circle. Does anyone have any other citation for the authorship of the Lord Darcy novels that could verify or disprove this? Or is it simply that I have somehow misread the exact implications of the welter of pseudonyms cited in Hubin? I think the books are very enjoyable, regardless of who wrote them, but perhaps this could be cleared up by someone more expert than myself. Accounting4Taste 20:23, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

To my knowledge, the info at Mark Phillips (author) details the complete history of their joint authorship pseudonym.--Alabamaboy 20:33, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Accounting4Taste, if you're right about what Hubin says & if Hubin is right, then a whole lot of other people are wrong. Here is a great link on RG:

http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10578 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.96.210.230 (talk) 22:09, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Walter Bupp / John Berryman

Some books at Project Gutenberg assert that "Walter Bupp" is another pseudonym for Randall Garrett, but elsewhere it's said to be a pseudonym for John Berryman , (Not to be confused with John Berryman the poet). From what little I've found on the web it looks like the latter is correct, but I haven't found a totally authoritative source either way. Berryman and Garrett had some very similar subject matter in their short stories and, to my mind, a similar writing style, but appear to be different people. Can anyone shed any more light on this? Pastychomper (talk) 11:58, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which is about as authoritative as you can get, states definitely that Walter Bupp was a pseudonym of John Berryman's and not, "as has often been stated in the past," one of Randall Garrett's. BPK (talk) 13:30, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Pastychomper (talk) 14:31, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

References

Canonical?

Suite mentale is here at gutenberg [1]. How does it fit in? 88888 13:23, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

And ...After a Few Words... [2] - canonical? 88888 (talk) 11:28, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Not forgetting Vigorish [3] 88888 (talk) 17:31, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Or Hail to the Chief [4] 88888 (talk) 16:42, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Names

It says in Mark Phillips (author) that his full name is "Randall Philip Garrett" (whence the "Phillips" in "Mark Phillips" comes). If that is true, this article should include that full name in the introduction. On Project Gutenberg, his name appears as "Garrett, Gordon Randall" which sounds fishy to me. Gordon has been a pseudonym of his, apparently, but is not actually one of his names, I'd guess. It would be nice if that part were cleared up in the article, too. --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 17:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Bibliography

The bibliography sections of the article are redundant and inaccurate, with works appearing in multiple places and short stories listed as novels, etc. It needs a major clean-up and realphabetization (currently the words A and The at the beginning of the title are used to order the titles). Shsilver (talk) 19:19, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd arrange it by dates. —Tamfang (talk) 07:04, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I fixed it. Did it by category (series, novels, collections, anthologies, short stories, poems, ...), then by date. Someone may want to check if I've labeled any novellas incorrectly as short stories. I think I contracted carpal tunnel syndrome on this one. N,N-dimethylpeptokryptamide (talk) 05:50, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Better you than me. :P —Tamfang (talk) 06:02, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Why is "Out Like a Light"/"The Impossibles" listed twice? —Tamfang (talk) 06:02, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Fixed. Pastychomper (talk) 13:33, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

Delinking some titles: The Chosen People, Needler, All the King's Horses (story), Hanging by a Thread. —Tamfang (talk) 06:10, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

The Highest Treason isn't mentioned anywhere on the page, is it? https://www.amazon.com/Highest-Treason-Randall-Garrett-Adventure/dp/1606643460 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barvinok (talk • contribs) 02:42, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Sources

Being a responsible adult means admitting when you made a mistake.

In April 2004, I added to this article the detail that Garrett spent the last several years of his life in a coma. It was 2004; not only was the culture on Wikipedia a bit sloppier than it is now, it had been barely a week since I began editing Wikipedia, and I wasn't entirely clear on how important it was to cite my sources instead of using Facts That I Knew.

I am reasonably certain that I acquired this detail from a death notice in an issue of either Analog or Asimov's (or possibly The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction), so that narrows it down quite a lot. I might even have that issue... somewhere; even if the issue is no longer in my possession, it's just a matter of examining the full text of every issue of those magazines from the months after Garrett's death. (I have a strong memory of reading the issue, and learning that he had died, and then realizing that he had died exactly eight years before, and being struck by the 'eight years' coincidence... although I also know that memory is fallible.)

Sources that pre-date my 2004 edit include:

Robert Silverberg, in his introduction to The Best of Randall Garrett (Pocket Books, 1982, and apparently the source for several of the more lurid Garrett anecdotes in the article) stated that "(i)n the summer of 1979 (...) [Garrett] was invaded by an alien organism, a virus that for a time threatened his life and for a much longer time has made it impossible for him to work."

The 'About the Authors' section in The River Wall (Bantam Spectra, 1986) — credited to both Garrett and to his then-wife Vicki Ann Heydron — states that Garrett suffered "serious and permanent injury".

I'll keep hunting to see what else I can find. DS (talk) 22:06, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

And the ISFDB says that the Garret obit was in September 1988 Analog, so it's just a matter of finding and consulting that issue. DS (talk) 22:12, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Okay, blah.

First: the aforementioned obit (p. 126) says "in his sleep, after a long struggle with encephalitis".

Second: a snippet on Google Books - from an issue of Analog that I haven't been able to identify, it appears to be "vol. 108 nos. 1-3" - says "Far worse, and most to be dreaded by a writer, is the loss of the mind years before the body, as happened when Randall Garrett, known in these pages most recently for the Lord" [END OF SNIPPET]. I will continue rummaging.

Third: in Benchmarks Continued, a 2012 collection of Algis Budrys reviews that were originally published from 1975 to 1982, Budrys addresses the aforementioned Best of Randall Garrett collection. "This [review] is beginning to sound like it might be an obituary. Far from it - a mutual friend reliably reports that when last seen, Garrett was seated at a dinner table, cheerfully ignoring the assembled company and attempting to remember the words to a dirty song." Further down the page, Budrys says that the book's cover portrait "substantiates the claims within that Randy is off the sauce, and, after a bout with something nasty in the way of viral infections, living on an even keel PAGE 238 IS NOT PART OF THIS BOOK PREVIEW". Note that Budrys does not mention when the Garrett-can't-remember-the-words-to-the-song incident took place. Also note that such an incident - ignoring the people around him and unable to remember the words - could be indicative of serious cognitive dysfunction; however, that would be at best WP:OR based on an informal second-hand report from a definitely biased observer.

Fourth: in Ansible #29 (October 1982), Dave Langford reported that, at the 40th World Science Fiction Convention, the announcement was made that Garrett had "permanently lost his memory".

Fifth: The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) says that the 1981-86 Gandalara series was written by Heydron "after viral meningitis had left [Garrett] hospitalized and amnesiac". Their entry on Heydron says "1979, when [Garrett] contracted meningitis and was subsequently unable to produce work with any consistency".

I've found other sources that look reputable but are from post-2004: "died of meningitis after several years of memory degeneration" - Mike Ashley, 2011); "in the wake of a serious attack of viral meningitis – gradually lost the ability to work after 1979, and was hospitalized from 1981 until his death", - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, entry by Brian M. Stableford and Dave Langford); Lawrence Person said in 2019 that Garrett "spent the last years of his life in Austin in what we would now call a “memory care facility” after a bout of viral meningitis".

So. Viral brain infection in 1979. Permanent memory loss. Incapacitated, hospitalized, unable to work. Altered state of consciousness. Died in his sleep in 1987. "Coma" isn't as binary as many people think - there's at least three coma scales that apply to adults - but I think it's reasonable to conclude that Garrett did not actually spend eight years "in a coma". Dementia, sure, but not actually a coma.

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. How do we incorporate this information? DS (talk) 18:35, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I'd like to propose that the article Lord Darcy (character) be moved to Randall Garrett. The article on Darcy is almost entirely an "in-universe" description of the character and his actions (see WP:NFICTION), is poorly referenced, and may not meet the General Notability Guidelines as it is. Since the character appears in more than one published work, there is no specific book title that looks to be a suitable target for a redirect or merge. The creator of the character, however, certainly is, hence this proposal. I do not get the sense that Darcy is notable independently of the books in which he appears or the author who created him, and so a merge seems a suitable way of handling such a situation. The "Literature" section of WP:OUTCOMES reiterates this. A loose necktie (talk) 23:08, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• No comments, no opposition, performing merge. A loose necktie (talk) 09:59, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I undid the merge. There was no discussion on this on the main Lord Darcy talk page and it's likely people missed the notification of a potential merge. In addition, what you did wasn't a merge as much as it was a stealth deletion, with all of the information in the original Lord Darcy article simply vanishing and almost none of it being placed in the Randall Garrett article. If you want to do such a merge, you must reach a consensus to do so.--SouthernNights (talk) 18:17, 12 February 2022 (UTC)