Talk:Grendel (short story)

Grogs
A couple of the other passengers on the Argos are Grogs. One wonders why they didn't know all about the kidnapping plot, or why they didn't tell anyone. I guess one moral of the story is that a sci-fi or fantasy writer should hesitate before giving large numbers of his characters some super-power like reading minds, because after that, every story has to be carefully examined for reasons why the super-power won't spoil it. In The Soft Weapon, Niven avoided this problem by having the Kzinti telepath critically wounded and tossed into suspended animation in the middle of the story.

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grendel
the synopsis here doesn't mention the title, or its significance.

grendel crops up elsewhere in niven's work, in the collaboration with pournelle & barnes, "the legacy of heorot".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot

it may also be just a favourite word of theirs; there's a tenuous connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feghoot

one such example of a 'feghoot' is arthur c clarke's short story, "neutron tide", which is somewhat related to niven's own "neutron star", at least thematically. the publisher of many sci-fi themed 'feghoot' stories had the pseudonym, formed anagramatically from his real name, of grendel briarton.

no idea if any of this is connected up, but it seems plausible. OR for now, so it'll have to sit back here.

duncanrmi (talk) 16:38, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Plot
Since the plot is discussed in such great detail, I don't know why the final twist was left out (the alien sculptor not being bound by any non-disclosure agreement). AnonMoos (talk) 22:23, 24 January 2020 (UTC)