by Charles L. Harness (NESFA Press, 1998, 537pp, $25.00)
Now NESFA Press (the publishing arm of the New England Science Fiction Association) have added this retrospective to their lists: consisting of sixteen short stories (one of them eponymous), the novella THE ROSE, introductions to some stories by Harness himself, short essays by David G. Hartwell and George Zebrowski (dealing with the later and earlier periods respectively), and a bibliography. The whole in a finely produced hardback, where the only proof error I noticed was in a publication date on the jacket blurb.
At least six of the stories included here have never been collected anywhere, and some of the others have appeared only in some of Martin H. Greenberg's more bizarre and less known anthologies. It is difficult to know why they have not been taken before, while the lack of re-print fees might explain why Harness never managed to abandon his job as a patent lawyer. On the other hand it may be that he failed to produce consistently and so to advertise himself.
In his note to "An Ornament to His Profession" (ANALOG 1966) he says "For ten years I had been very busy being a patent attorney, and hadn't written anything ... Time to get back into the arena. Write what you know about, the experts say. So I wrote this little novelette about life in a patent department..." In fact, as titles such as "The Million Year Patent" (AMAZING 1967) and "Probably Cause" (ORBIT 4 1968) suggest, the legal world, and even specifically patent law became one of his subjects and a quarry for his material. What Harness had discovered was that the requirements of the law could become the driving heart of a plot.
In the recent "The Tetrahedron" (ANALOG 1994) Harness specifically uses the concepts of prior invention and applications in interference (both important parts in allowing or denying a U.S. patent) to justify investigating time. This involves the paradox (Harness uses the word repeatedly in his stories) of lawyers using a time machine to travel back to 1503 so that Leonardo Da Vinci can be asked to give a deposition on his possible prior invention of the same machine. What this story also indicates is how much Harness has always included as background, but uses almost as throwaway. (That redundancy has been one of his identifiable characteristics, though, going back to the helter-skelter filling of plot and material in THE PARADOX MEN). In "Probable Cause" a U.S. Supreme Court judge is also the widow of a Martian astronaut, while in "The Tetrahedron", for instance, rather than have the modern lawyers learn Italian in hypno-sleep the translation machine they take with them is treated almost as a clown figure, in which the computer on a table top pretends to be a man hidden under the table when communicating with the Renaissance advocate. Both stories also reveal a common strain in Harness's work - his tendency to an almost love-pulp re-direction of his stories so that characters, living or dead, reveal their true affection. In "The Tetrahedron" Elizabeth Gerard does not go back to New York, but stays in 1503 with a heterosexual Leonardo Da Vinci. In "Probable Cause" Helen Nord has flashes of telepathic communion with her deceased beloved. In that story she and her fellow judges are considering a case in which psi powers are under question (the evidence of remote viewing of a presidential assassination), but it still seems a strange, exotic and ultimately unconvincing way to construct a parallel plot.
Another characteristic of Harness's worlds from is the certainly of powerful and abusive government. He may actually centre his stories about these figures. In some cases, as in "The Rose" itself, even husband and wife may take different political positions, or defend activists on one side or the other. In "The New Reality" (THRILLING WONDER STORIES 1950), the chief censor of all new invention is revealed to be the one-time inventor of the devices most challenging to the existing order, who has given up resistance. In Britain we are only aware of these characters in a small way (minor journalists moving from the Socialist Workers Party, say, to the Conservative Party), but the US provided more of these, such as George Orwell's bane James Burnham, and the figures in the persecution of Alger Hiss. Harness may have been thinking of them, but as Tom Shippey has pointed out of Robert Heinlein, Harness treats the acceptance and quietism of his characters as a moral standard, whereas Orwell thought it a subject for discussion and warning.
It is not clear why Harness should see so much of this degeneracy in the future, for where his characters do make morally acceptable judgements is in his historical stories. "Quarks At Appomattox" (ANALOG 1983) has Robert E. Lee rejecting the offers of munitions from time-travelling neo-Nazis, accepting the end of the slave state, and dealing far more directly with the same material than Harry Turtledove's later GUNS OF THE SOUTH. "Summer Solstice" (ANALOG 1984) deals with Eratosphenes, the Hellenic Egyptian who was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth, and his struggle with the priesthood to transmit his conceptual breakthrough of the Earth as a globe. Eratosphenes's unintended aide in this is an alien making a quick repair stop, and his opponent is a vicious and small-minded hierophant. The way in which Eratosphenes wins the debate, and the way in which the alien satisfies its own mission, are good enough to elide over here. It was my favourite in this collection.
"Paradox" and "time" might be the words most frequently associated with Charles Harness's name, yet these themes made less impression on me than less obvious concepts such as "morality" and "government". Other readers should take this volume and attempt to work out why.