Paranoia Gambits in Literature.
By Author:
- In Isaac Asimov:
- Black Widowers' "The Acquisitive Chuckle": A rich collector's business partnership goes bad, and as the partner leaves, he snaps his suitcase shut in a suspicious manner and chuckles "acquisitively". The collector freaks out and his life goes downhill as he frantically searches through everything he owns to try to find out what valuable item his partner stole from him. Years later, his lawyer confronts the thief and asks him what he took. His answer? "Only his peace of mind, sir."
- "Let's Get Together": Lynn guesses that the claim that ten Deceptively Human Robots have infiltrated America and her allies might be nothing more than a story designed to make them act in a paranoid fashion, causing small social disruptions and distracting from scientific research. He's overruled because if he's wrong, then when the average person found out about the threat, the leadership would be driven out of office.
- The actual plot also turns out to be one: the robots are each an individual component of a powerful bomb that will go off when all ten are together. They're disguised as ten prominent scientists that would be likely choices to be called in to figure out a way to find the robots, and the government very narrowly avoids disaster when the plot is discovered while they're en route to a conference to do so.
- In a rather more serious example, a woman in an Agatha Christie short story discovers her husband intends to murder her once she signs an important document - a will or insurance thing or some such. She makes coffee, and insists on telling him something before she signs this document. She then tells him a completely invented story about two previous husbands that she poisoned in their coffee. He assumes she has poisoned him, freaks out, and dies of a heart attack; but there was nothing in his coffee.
- A related short story (can't remember the title just now), has a book critic happen upon a woman whose book he criticized, but is unaware of that fact. She makes him a mushroom omelet, and while he is eating she mentions that she is an amateur mushroom hunter, and that she'd picked those herself. He panics, goes to the emergency room, and has his stomach pumped, only to find that they were perfectly ordinary mushrooms, and she has never picked them at all. The kicker: he had criticized her book for its inability to make the story seem real.
By Title:
- In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates' friend Chaerephon asks the Oracle of Delphi if there is any man wiser than Socrates. The Oracle is famous for her convoluted and ambiguous replies, but that time she answers a straight "No." Socrates, being who he is, is convinced it is some kind of sophisticated twist and spends much time and energy trying to understand it.
- Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell. CIA chief Elliot has protected himself from Saul's vengeance by taking up residence in a Truce Zone for retired spies. Saul can't harm him there, but works to create enough disruption that they'll both be thrown out and he can continue his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. At one point Saul plants wires in Elliot's greenhouse so he'll tear up his beloved roses looking for the fertilizer bomb he's convinced Saul has planted there.
- Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers II: In The Elevator, Martin suspects, the second time he sees the strange woman in the elevator, that she's trying to make him scared... and it's working.
- One of the characters in Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm performs one of these on himself, though not intentionally. He just knows that his sister, Shona, is mad at him for letting their mother put a spell on her, and he remembers very clearly the way she waited patiently for days to take revenge on one of their siblings when she was younger. He never stops to think that maybe she's matured since then, and all this distracts him from fulfilling his mission, which was tough enough already.
- From Terry Pratchett's Discworld series:
- Wyrd Sisters:Only once, in the entire history of witchery on the Ramtops, had a thief broken into a witch's cottage. The witch concerned visited the most terrible punishment on him.
She did nothing, although sometimes when she saw him in the village she'd smile in a faint, puzzled way. After three weeks of this the suspense was too much for him and he took his own life; in fact he took it all the way across the continent, where he became a reformed character and never went home again. - The short story The Sea and Little Fishes. Granny Weatherwax does this to the entire Witch community merely by smiling and kindly offering to help with the Witch Trials, when she had been horribly insulted the night before by one of the contest's organizers. Seeing one of the most successful Crones out there acting like a kindly old lady makes everyone think she's planning something terrifying, and ruins the whole thing through sheer paranoia.
- Both Angua and Carrot are fond of saying that you can get quite a lot done with a friendly smile. Her smile has lots of pointy teeth; his tends to imply teeth. Neither tend to follow through with these potential threats, as that would be Police Brutality, but that doesn't mean people won't draw their own conclusions. As Sergeant Colon puts it, it's commonplace to see someone bluff with a bad hand, but it's rare to see someone bluff (and win) with no cards.
- Two in Going Postal; one on Crispin Horsefry at the beginning, where Vetinari sends a clerk to very visibly spy on him, rearrange his things and otherwise make it look like Vetinari is onto him. And another on Reacher Gilt at the end, done by Moist; among other things, he makes it look like he has a secret plan to win by using a Flying Broomstick, when his plan is entirely different.
- Interesting Times has Rincewind pull a massive one of these that involves him spreading the rumor of the "Great Wizard" summoning 2,300,009 invisible vampire ghosts that do not exist and are not heading this way. And "Nor has the Great Wizard made them twice as big as usual." He then tells the people he has told this "fact" to to set the minds of others at ease by shutting down this rumor - which involves telling them about the rumor.
- Wyrd Sisters:
- This is how Dora defeats Albin in book four of Dora Wilk Series: she changes their kill charm formula by adding runes "mirror reflection" and "powering up" (thus making the charm they make return to the caster stronger) and then suggests that she added charm elixir to their drink. She didn't, but being a vampire, they think she did, so if they ever tries throwing this charm again, it will kill them instead.
- The Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Doctor Trap. There's a lot of I Know You Know I Know about the titular trap the Doctor has supposedly set for the villain, but what it boils down to is that as long as the villain believes there's a Doctor Trap, the Doctor has the upper hand.
- Holes: After Stanley has learned to no longer expect water from the vengeful Mr. Sir, Mr. Sir surprises him by refilling his canteen that day. But then he takes it to his car and gives it back a minute later, still full. Then he waits for Stanley to drink from it. When he's so thirsty he can no longer bear it, Stanley pours out the entire contents of the canteen, refusing to drink from it thanks to his suspicion.
- Zhuge Liang's Empty Fortress Strategy in Romance of the Three Kingdoms was one of these mixed with Refuge in Audacity. In a bad position with a massively superior army headed his way, Zhuge Liang sent most of his troops away and had the rest disguise themselves, leaving the fort almost completely defenseless. Then he proceeded to go up on the wall and calmly play the zither, ignoring the approaching army. Upon seeing this, Zhuge Liang's arch-rival Sima Yi immediately expected a trap, since he knew Zhuge Liang to be a man who took very few risks and was prone to feigning weakness to bait an ambush. Ignoring the advice of his son, Sima Yi abandoned direct assault to try and get around the obvious trap before him...and wound up marching his army into Zhuge Liang's actual trap.
- In Super Minion, Tofu at one point finds out that police are staking out a clothing store that he visited. On orders from Viper, his response is to later walk past the store wearing the face of one of the officers. This instantly ruins any evidence they were hoping to gather against patrons of the shop since any or all of them could have just been Tofu, and also forces them to institute burdensome protective measures against infiltration.
- In Tangled Webs a drow said that they have a proverb "Revenge is Best Served Cold"... and the second meaning is that knowing there's a scheming vengeful bastard out to get you usually has the target sweating long before the actual revenge is done..
- In the introduction of the Raymond Smullyan logic puzzle book What Is The Name Of This Book?, the author talks about an incident in his childhood when his sister promised him she would "get him good" one April Fools Day. After a paranoia-filled day Smullyan proudly announced that April 1st was over and she hadn't got him once. She retorted that fooling him into fearing a non-existent prank was the prank.
