Death of Charles Harness

[Michael Moorcock]

I recently heard of the death of Charles Harness, author of The Paradox Men and The Rose, among others. Harness, with Alfred Bester, was the chief influence on my decision to write science fiction. He was an enormous influence on me, Barry Bayley and others associated with the British 'New Wave'. I've written a short memoir which will appear in next month's Locus. He'll be greatly missed.

[Typhoid_Mary]

Sad news. Oddly enough, I've only just finished reading The Rose...

[Michael Moorcock]

Did you like it ?

[A_Non_Ymous]

Those are good books. He wrote nice short stories, too.

In the U.S., NESFA is the place to get the work of this sadly overlooked writer.

Harness was 90 if memory serves. He'll be missed. :(

LSN

[Michael Moorcock]

Absolutely. The New Reality remains one of my favourites. I'm also inclined to prefer the novella version of The Paradox Men. I asked Harness how he'd expanded it from the magazine to the novel. He said he did it by the simple expedient of adding two more adjectives where there was one...

[A_Non_Ymous]

Damon Knight wrote an appreciative critical essay on Harness back when "The Paradox Men" appeared as a novella. He called Harness's fictions "elegant cat's-cradles" or something like that. Encountering that essay years later led me to seek out Harness's work. Sf criticism can serve as education for readers.

There's an omnibus of 4 of Harness's novels under the title Rings from NESFA. They also have a nice volume of his collected short stories.

I reread The Paradox Men just about 2 years ago. I know what you mean about the padding. It's somewhat irritating but not fatal. I've seen worse. :roll:

LSN

P. S. By the way, I just bought and read Wizardry and Wild Romance. Excellent book. You were a little hard on Lovecraft, but it's a remarkably sound survey/study. The letter from Leiber to Lin Carter about Tolkien that you quoted was classic. The problem in a nutshell.

[David Mosley]

Not so long ago I acquired a second hand copy of the Panther edition of The Rose, with short stories 'The Chessplayers' and 'The New Reality' (& intro by Mike - which can be seen in the Image Gallery at [link expired]).

So far I've only got round to reading 'The Chessplayers' - which was very good imo (loved the final line in that piece) but I will sit down sometime soon and read the others.

I've been a SF reader for a long time, but I only heard of Charles Harness for the first time this year. Mike, any ideas why Harness has been apparently so easily 'forgotten' while other writers like Asimov, van Vogt, E.E. 'Doc' Smith and Clarke seem much more established in people's minds?

[Marca]

I have the Compact edition of The Rose, must add the cover to the Image Gallery if it's not already there. It's been years since I read the stories though. I think Harness was virtually forgotten until The Rose was republished in the 60s.

[Michael Moorcock]

I suspect that Harness will enjoy something of a 'rediscovery'. He didn't publish very much and didn't have a strong interest in keeping himself in print, not being a professional like the other writers you mention. However, it's also true that the likes of van Vogt are somewhat disappearing from the modern sf readers' consciousness. Harness is actually a more sophisticated writer than those you mention. Could that be something to do with it ? The Rose, which is a classic argument between science and art, may be less accessible than some of the others. The Paradox Men is what Brian Aldiss coined the term 'Widescreen Baroque' to describe. It originally appeared in Startling Stories. It seems the lot of some writers to enjoy obscurity as much as it is the lot of others to stand as exemplars of their colleagues. Chandler touches on this a little when he mentions that Hammett was one of a number of talented writers around Black Mask, just as I've argued that Philip K. Dick was one of several talented writers around Galaxy magazine. Harness has some of the same appeal as Dick in that he writes about both metaphysics and physics and is curious about both. His short stories appeared in both Astounding (Time Trap) and Startling Stories (Flight into Yesterday -- later The Paradox Men) and if it hadn't been for the enthusiasm of people like me, Aldiss and Bayley, he might have been forgotten pretty much entirely, but Aldiss revived Paradox Men and I revived The Rose (also reprinted some shorts in New Worlds) just at a point when Harness himself felt like coming out of retirement. He'd given up writing to spend more time with his kids (really!). He was a full-time Washington patent attorney and an ex-seminarist (he'd originally trained for the priesthood). These appeared in the UK and actually stimulated his republication in the US. Thereafter, he began writing again (Ring of Ritornel etc). He retired to Texas and I'd hoped to see him but never quite made it, sadly. We enjoyed a good correspondence, off and on. Let's see if we can get him republished!

[A_Non_Ymous]

The hardback from NESFA is around 600 pages, and includes his novels The Paradox Men, The Ring of Ritornel, Firebird, and his relatively recent novel, Drunkard's Endgame.

The collection of his shorter fiction from NESFA, An Ornament to His Profession, in addition to the well-known title story, contains the novella of "The Rose."

There are books by Harness that still languish in obscurity. The NESFA editions are labors of love, of course, but they are nice editions, and seriously produced. They aren't really a major publisher, but they keep in print some fine work that would otherwise be unavailable.

LSN

[Michael Moorcock]

Sounds as if I should order them. I'll check 'em out.
Thanks. Must admit I was a little disappointed in his most recent work, compared to his earliest work. My thought was that while we were all writing out of the limelight for the pulps, which had no critical attention, we were writing less self-consciously and more powerfully -- just as we produced rock and roll. Few of us expected those stories to be reprinted in book form and certainly not forty or fifty years later!

[A_Non_Ymous]

Sounds as if I should order them. I'll check 'em out.
Thanks.

You're welcome. Always willing to assist fellow readers.

The book of short stories was nice to get. Most of the stories by Harness that I had read over the years came from anthologies, and many I had never seen.

Must admit I was a little disappointed in his most recent work, compared to his earliest work.

It's true. His work from the '50s might well be his high point. The character of the work changed in a subtle way as time went on. I don't know if it seemed more self-conscious (in a detrimental way) or just possessed less tension.

Even so, his later work was intelligent and readable.

My thought was that while we were all writing out of the limelight for the pulps, which had no critical attention, we were writing less self-consciously and more powerfully -- just as we produced rock and roll. Few of us expected those stories to be reprinted in book form and certainly not forty or fifty years later!

Isn't that a curious irony? The highest-quality work that Bester and Harness and other writers of the '50s produced still stands up to a close examination today -- better than many another "serious" contemporary. Some of the work of these writers is available in print. Bester's stories have come out in 2 volumes from iBooks (not my favorite publisher, in truth). (I gave a copy of Tyger! Tyger! to my daughter a few years ago. It's a fine book. Published by Vintage, no less.) As you say, one doubts that Bester or Harness or Kornbluth or many others gave any thought to their work being in print in 2005. Quality will keep things alive. Genre fiction, however, seems subject to the whims of the taste of the times more than non-genre fiction, so an ebb and rise in these guys' reputations doesn't surprise me.

LSN

[Typhoid_Mary]

Did you like it ?

Yes, much more than I expected to. I'm now considering buying the NESFA editions that LSN mentioned.

[A_Non_Ymous]

The ~600 page book of stories (long and short) is probably the best buy. The collection of novels is a bit of un sac mixte. I liked them, but they weren't uniformly as satisfying.

Mes 0,02 euros.

LSN

[Michael Moorcock]

Well, I must admit I was a bit disappointed in the more modern novels and I have a copy of The Paradox Men. Indeed, I'm pretty sure I have it as Flight to Forever in Startling as well!