The Paradox Men

Charles L. Harness, patent lawyer by day, published his first SF story in 1948, and wrote intermittently until his death in 2005. One of his earliest stories, “Flight into Yesterday”, way expanded into the novel The Paradox Men in 1953. Only occasionally in print, the novel can be found today in NESFA Press’s omnibus titled Rings, which also includes three other novels written throughout his career. Championed by Michael Moorcock in New Worlds in the ‘60s and influential, according to George Zebrowski, who wrote the introduction to Rings, on Bester, Dick, and Vonnegut, it’s somewhat puzzling that Harness isn’t better known, especially after reading the mind-blower that is The Paradox Men. David Pringle does include it in his hundred best, though a little grudgingly, calling it “one of the schlock classics of American magazine sf. It has been compared frequently with the fiction of A. E. Van Vogt, a very popular though slapdash writer whose works I have not been able to include in this listing.”

Critics such as Pringle are unable to get past the obvious narrative deficiencies of Van Vogt to embrace the exhilarating (but possibly somewhat crazy) sense of wonder within, but Harness is a step up in terms of writing—he maintains Van Vogt’s focus on evolutionary supermen and cosmic wonder, while still writing a story that doesn’t entirely throw logic out the window (although some of the logic, again influenced by Van Vogt, is non-Aristotelian), with an ending that actually makes sense of the craziness. As Harness himself said in conversation with Zebrowski in 1999, his novel was “a tribute to “A. E. Van Vogt… All overflowing with action, mystery, suspense, and superhumanity. His worlds unfolded before us with multidimensional clarity. I tried to figure out how he did it. Fifty years later I’m still trying.”

The Paradox Men is difficult to summarize without spoiling the ending, because the story is circular—it ends back where it began. Much of the pleasure of the novel derives from the slow realization by the reader, as the story progresses, of what has really been happening earlier in the novel, including the true nature and identity of the various characters. The novel is set in Imperial America in 2177, a slave-based society in conflict with the Eastern bloc that has reached a stage of decadence which we are led to believe will ultimately result in its destruction in an East-West nuclear war, as predicted by the Toynbeean theory of cyclical history.

Five years earlier, a mysterious spaceship had crash-landed, containing the equally mysterious Alar, and a terrified tarsier (!), who attaches himself to Haze-Gaunt, the Chancellor of America Imperial. It’s not giving too much away to reveal that it becomes clear fairly early on that this is probably the same faster-than-light spaceship that is currently being built as an escape from the coming conflagration, and which has relatavistically returned to Earth five years before it left. But no one knows exactly how this happened, because Alar has no memory of events prior to his ship’s crash landing. Once on Earth, Alar becomes a member of the Society of Thieves, an underground organization dedicated to social reform and the eradication of slavery, in the hope of preventing the coming social collapse. The Thieves have access to a shielding technology that resists projectiles but is vulnerable to the slower-moving penetration of a blade. (Didn’t Frank Herbert have something like this in Dune?) So, along with the myriad other ingredients in this short novel, we get lots of sword fighing, and dueling is back in fashion. This, along with the regression of society toward extreme class differences and slavery, creates the strange sense that, while technology has continued to advance, society has regressed.

The plot consists of Alar’s attempt to discover his past, which is clearly tied in with the larger forces at play. He has discovered that he has superhuman powers, implying that he is a more evolutionarily advanced human, and this fact is presumably related to his experience in the spaceship. For example, his eyes can project light as well as receive it, allowing him to alter what others see. The Thieves want to better understand his true nature, hoping he can help them in their fight against the authorities, represented by Haze-Gaunt, who would also like to know Alar’s origin, possibly to prevent him from creating the time paradox that seems to have resulted in his powers. Alar’s destiny takes him from Earth to the Moon to the Sun (where men mining nuclear fuel in small artificial outposts are inexorably driven insane by the conditions), then back to Earth, as he tries to discover who he is.

Among the other characters, there are two that seem tied into events from several different angles: First, there is Kieris, former wife of Society of Thieves founder Kennicot Muir. Haze-Gaunt’s nemesis, Muir has been dead or missing for a decade, with Haze-Gaunt revenging himself on the renegade by taking Kieris as a slave, and forcing her to become his wife. She continues to surreptitiously help the Thieves, and there is a mysterious connection between her and Alar, that neither understands. Second, there is the “Meganet Mind,” a human computer, formerly a disfigured circus performer, capable of correlating all known data to synthesize advances in knowledge and make accurate predictions. A slave of Shey, Haze-Gaunt’s sado-masochistic psychologist advisor, the Mind is also secretly in contact with the Thieves, manipulating both sides for reasons that will eventually become clear…

The Paradox Men is a very short novel in the ‘50s mode—the focus is on fast-moving events and cosmic wonder, not characterization. The characters are fairly well drawn, but their actions, relationships and interactions (and, ultimately, their identities), are tied inexorably into their roles in a drama that overwhelms any individual, encompassing the evolution of human society, and of humanity itself. Harness takes Van Vogt’s template and adds a brilliant time paradox element to create a novel that keeps the reader in constant suspense in regard to the nature of the story’s events and the characters’ identities. Narratively and thematically, it cycles back on itself ingeniously. Who is Alar, and will he be on the faster-than-light ship, the launch of which nears as the novel gets closer to its conclusion? And what effect will it have on history? Can the cycle be influenced or interrupted? And how did a tarsier learn to talk, even if all it can ever say to Haze-Gaunt is “don’t go…don’t go…”?