What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
This topic is about
Pawn's Gambit
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. scifi: short: aliens capture human, and pit him in strategic games vs. other aliens [s]
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Do you remember where you read it? Was it in an anthology, online, magazine, etc? I noticed you are looking for several short stories. You may want to include where you read them (in an anthology, magazine, etc) in your post. I think that may help people know where to start searching.
At first I thought this is "Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...but on closer look, I think it's "Pawn's Gambit" by Tim Zahn, published in Analog and collected in a few places listed here http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
Yup, definitely not Russell:"The implausibility of finishing such a task [Tower of Hanoi] was used for comedic effect in “Now Inhale,” a 1959 classic science fiction story by American Eric Frank Russell, in which the protagonist is allowed to play one “game” from Earth before being executed on an alien planet."
Zahn sounds quite plausible. I'll move this to possibly solved.
Tab, if you'll note - I did that for the ones that I could get anything close for that. As in this case, the Zahn short was only published once in Analog? and I suspect that I read it in _Distant Friends and Others_
organizing, nothing to see here.
Justanotherbiblophile wrote: "organizing, nothing to see here."lol so of course I came anyway because Pavlov...
short story(?)
Conquering alien species.
They are investigating new/recent opponents for warmaking potential.
They snatch a random human, who is a professor?
And they pit him in games against other aliens. Like chess, or other strategic types of games. This is part of their threat analysis stuff. They take no direct participation, since they say that eventually they're going to return the capturees - and don't want to give away any of their capabilities.
The human puts together clues.
They keep the human longer than they normally do (I think), because he's the first human they've got - and he's really, really good compared to any other species they've tested (maybe better than they are, even, at strategic thinking).
They pit the human against one of their current foes - who they're in the process of fighting/absorbing this third alien species' empire.
They tell both the human and the alien that the winner will be sent home. The human asks if he can design the game (he wins the toss)
He outwits the captors when he put together some clues, and transmits those clues to the third alien by cunning game design underneath the captors' snouts.
He then (subtly) throws the game.
These clues allow the third alien, who gets returned to his race because he 'won' the game to link up with humanity while launching attacks on the captors (now that they know where they're located thanks to clues in the game, and their new ally: human strategic ferociousness).
Eventually the third alien rescues the professor from the testing area.