Creativity And Cliches

In a cinema on Marketgate, Penrith, I used to watch cinema serials where an episode ended with the hero falling off a cliff -

- and the following episode began with him grabbing hold of a bush growing out from just under the edge of the cliff.

This is a cliche but authors like Poul Anderson do it well. We think that Flandry and Chives are about to die but Banner, disobeying orders, returns to rescue them. (A Stone In Heaven, XIII.) The cliche works best when we really do think that the character has died. See Dead, Not Really.

When attacking Cairncross's base on a Ramnuan moon, Flandry deduces that the Duke's trained men will be spread thin so that the base will be guarded by computers, easier to fool. We might skip past such well-observed details when reading but Anderson's texts are packed with them, nevertheless.