Randall Garrett (December 16, 1927 - December 31, 1987) was a prolific writer for Astounding and other science fiction magazines in the 1950s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure sf, and collaborated with him on two novels about Earth bringing civilization to an alien planet.

He is best known for the Lord Darcy books--the novel Too Many Magicians and two short story collections--set in an alternate world where a joint British-French empire has survived into the twentieth century and where magic works and has been scientifically codified. The Darcy books are rich in jokes, puns, and references (particularly to works of detective and spy fiction: Lord Darcy is himself partially modelled on Sherlock Holmes), elements that often appear in his shorter works.

He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including: David Gordon, Darrel T. Langart, Alexander Blade, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Leonard G. Spencer, S. M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance. He was also a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, as "Randall of the High Tower" (a pun on "garret").

Garrett suffered an attack of encephalitis in the early 1980s and was not able to write after that; he spent the last years of his life in a coma.

In 1999, Randall Garrett won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History Special Achievement Award for the Lord Darcy series.

Selected Works

Novels

• Unwise Child (1962)
• Anything You Can Do (1963) (as Darrel T. Langart)
• Too Many Magicians (1967)

with Robert Silverberg, as Robert Randall

• The Shrouded Planet (1957)
• The Dawning Light (1959)

with Laurence M. Janifer, as Mark Phillips

• Brain Twister (1962)
• The Impossibles (1963)
• Supermind (1963)

Collections

• Takeoff! (1980)
• The Best of Randall Garrett (1982) (edited by Robert Silverberg)
• Takeoff Too! (1987)
• Lord Darcy (2002) (all the Darcy stories, with minor editing to remove repetitions of the backstory)

External links

• Bibliography on SciFan