An Ornament to His Profession

by Charles L. Harness

This collection brings back into print stories covering Harness' repertoire from alternate history, SF about the legal profession, and lyrical and witty stories of science and the arts, including the short novel The Rose and sixteen other works of short fiction. It also contains introductions by David Hartwell and the editor, Priscilla Olson, an afterward by George Zebrowski, a bibliography, and cover art by James Stanley Daugherty.

Genres: Science Fiction

537 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Also credited as Charles Harness.
Charles Leonard Harness was born December 29, 1915 in Colorado City TX. After an abortive stint at Texas Christian University, studying to be a preacher, he moved on to George Washington University in Washington DC, where he received a B.S. degree in 1942, and a law degree in 1946. He married in 1938, and he and wife Nell have a daughter and a son. He worked as a mineral economist for the US Bureau of Mines, 1941-47, then became a patent attorney, first with American Cyanamid (1947-1953), then with W.R. Grace & Co. (1953-1981). His first story, ‘‘Time Trap’’, appeared in Astounding (8/48), and he went on to write a number of well-regarded SF stories, many involving future trials and patent attorneys. A series of patent office spoofs/stories (some co-written with Theodore L. Thomas) appeared under the pseudonym Leonard Lockhard, beginning with ‘‘Improbable Profession’’ (Astounding 9/52). His first published novel, Flight Into Yesterday (aka The Paradox Men), first appeared as a 1949 novella, and was expanded in 1953. The Rose, his most famous novella, appeared as a book in 1966. It was followed by Wagnerian space opera The Ring of Ritornel (1968), Wolfhead (1978), The Catalyst (1980), Firebird (1981), The Venetian Court (1982), Redworld (1986), Krono (1988), Lurid Dreams (1990), and Lunar Justice (1991). His short fiction has been collected in An Ornament to His Profession (1998), which includes not only ‘‘The Rose’’ but a new novella as well.

Reviews

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviewing only the title Novella.

I first read this as a teenager. Eight years later, in a Patent and Trademark course at law school, I understood for the first time the law integral to the plot was accurate. This is the (only) SF written by, for, and about a chemical patent lawyer. While my Patent Law professor proctored our final exam, I handed him the SF collection I then had containing this story; he read, we wrote. The story was new to him, and he loved it. The exams were blind graded—but I still got an “A”.

Never mind. This story owes less to law than to Goethe. The irony is this Novella’s title is a slightly altered quote of Francis Bacon, the creator of the scientific method. Balancing Ying and Yang, thus, is the true topic of this story. Hard to think of a more universal topic, although told in an unusual setting.

My highlights provide some (U.S.) legal citations for the curious. Only one changed since that time, though it would alter the plot’s suspense. But you don’t need to be a lawyer, or a chemist, to enjoy this—all is well explained within the story.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

CONTENTS


◼️Non-fiction:

▪️"An Ornament" - Priscilla Olson
▪️"Charles Harness: New Realities" - David G. Hartwell
▪️"Celebrating Charles L. Harness" - George Zebrowski
▪️"Bibliography" - Priscilla Olson


◼️Fiction:

▪️"The Rose" (1953)
▪️"Time Trap" (1948)
▪️"Stalemate in Space" (1949)
▪️"The New Reality" (1950)
▪️"The Chessplayers" (1953)
▪️"Child by Chronos" (1953)
▪️"An Ornament to His Profession" (1966)
▪️"The Alchemist" (1966)
▪️"The Million Year Patent" (1967)
▪️"Probable Cause" (1968)
▪️"The Araqnid Window" (1974)
▪️"Summer Solstice" (1984)
▪️"Quarks at Appomattox" (1983)
▪️"George Washington Slept Here" (1985)
▪️"O Lyric Love" (1985)
▪️"The Tetrahedron" (1994)
▪️"Lethary Fair" (1998)


The title of this book, An Ornament to His Profession, is taken from an excellent story by Harness included here. It also refers to Harness, who was indeed an ornament to the profession of writing science fiction. Harness was still living when this book was published in 1998; he died in 2005 at the age of 89. He was still having new stories published at the time of his death.

Harness was a patent attorney, a man with degrees in both law and chemistry. Not surprisingly, law and science are both frequently featured in this book. Many of his stories also feature time - time travel and the attendant paradoxes.

In fact, Harness's first published story, included in this book, was "Time Trap" from 1948. It is complex and more than acceptable as a first published work, but it is certainly not at the level of his later fiction. "Stalemate in Space" from 1949 is likewise better than merely competent but less than inspired.

But then we come to "The New Reality" from 1950. The following is slightly emended from my earlier review of the December, 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories in which this story first appeared:


It concerns someone, Professor Luce, who is trying to change reality.

Reality, the story says, isn't fixed; it's whatever mankind thinks it is. When people thought the world was flat, the world was flat; when people thought the world was round, it became round.

In the following passage, Prentiss is the main character in the story and Burchard is one of the people Prentiss is trying to convince:

"I postulate only the omnipotent human mind," said Prentiss. "In the seventeenth century, Hooke, Ray, Woodward, to name a few, studied chalk, gravel, marble, and even coal, without finding anything inconsistent with results to be expected from the Noachian Flood. But now that we‘ve made up our minds that the earth is older, the rocks seem older, too."

"But how about evolution?" demanded Burchard. "Surely that wasn‘t a matter of a few centuries?"

"Really?" replied Prentiss. "Again, why assume that the facts are any more recent than the theory? The evidence is all the other way. Aristotle was a magnificent experimental biologist, and he was convinced that life could be created spontaneously. Before the time of Darwin there was no need for the various species to evolve, because they sprang into being from inanimate matter. As late as the eighteenth century, Needham, using a microscope, reported that he saw microbe life arise spontaneously out of sterile culture media. These abiogeneticists were, of course, discredited and their work found to be irreproducible, but only after it became evident that the then abiogenetic facts were going to run inconsistent with later 'facts' flowing from advancing biologic theory."

Professor Luce thinks that if he is able to bring about a new reality, he will then be god-like. Prentiss wants to prevent this; he knows that if this happens, the current world and the people in it will all be changed.

This is obviously not a simple story of spaceships or time travel. It is extremely complex, far beyond what one would expect to find in a 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The story ends with a familiar science fiction trope. I may be remembering this incorrectly, but I believe I once read that when Anthony Boucher was editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he would expect to get a story submitted involving this trope at least once a week. I think it almost works in "The New Reality", but I can see why people might disagree.


The trope that I did not reveal in my earlier review is that the male and female protagonists of the tale are Adam and Eve, bringing forth a new civilization. "Luce" is, naturally, Lucifer. This is a fine, thoughtful story with or without this surprise ending. It was chosen for inclusion in The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951, edited by Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty and Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories: 12 (1950), edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg.

The next story in the book is the only entirely comic tale here. "The Chessplayers" tells of a chess-playing rat and the reaction - or lack of reaction - of other chess players to this remarkable rodent. I think it is quite funny.

Three of the shortest of the remaining stories are perhaps the least striking of the post-1950 entries here. "The Million Year Patent" tells of faster-than-light travel, with a nice twist concerning patent law. "Quarks at Appomattox" is a time travel story in which the South has a chance to win the Civil War, if Robert E. Lee chooses to accept some help from the future. "O Lyric Love" is also a time travel story, about changes brought about in the lives of Elizabeth and Robert Browning. A few of the stories in the book have individual introductions by Harness; I found the one for "O Lyric Love" particularly interesting.

When I first read "The Araqnid Window" a few years ago, I thought it was quite poor. I still think that this story of archeology on another planet, with time travel and a monstrous alien thrown in, is something of an old-fashioned mindless adventure story; I would not be surprised if that was what Harness intended. However, I should note that "The Araqnid Window" was ranked by the magazine Locus as the seventh best of all the science fiction or fantasy novellas published in 1974.

"Child by Chronos" is a story that I read long ago but always remembered, although I could not recall who wrote it. This is a brief, extremely original time paradox tale. I think that it appears to be a precursor to Robert Heinlein's celebrated story "All You Zombies," published six years after "Child by Chronos." This story should be better known.

"An Ornament to His Profession" is one of my favorite stories. It is partly science fiction and partly fantasy, the story of a patent attorney whose wife and daughter had been killed in an accident; he now lives in and for his job. He abets a colleague's proposed deal with the devil to convince his co-worker to help in a patent case, telling himself that this can do no real harm. This is brilliant and moving; it was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Harness wrote a sequel with the same central character, "The Alchemist," published in the same year, 1966. This was also nominated for those two awards. This is, in my opinion, not as striking as the earlier story. Instead of the strong fantasy element in "An Ornament to His Profession," "The Alchemist" uses extrasensory perception, also referred to as "psi," which was a very popular topic in science fiction at that time. I think a flaw in "The Alchemist" is that the main character of the previous story seems quite different in this one.

In "The Tetrahedron," a female lawyer and two companions travel to Italy back in the time of Leonardo da Vinci to help settle a possible dispute about a patent. The woman finds much more than she expected. This is a winning tale with a most satisfying ending.

"Summer Solstice" is set much further in the past, in Egypt eighty years after Alexander the Great had invaded and set Greeks on the Egyptian throne. Eratosthenes, a mathematician who reports to the Pharoah, has accurately calculated the shape and size of the Earth, but he knows that if he tells the truth, he will be considered a blasphemer, who may be put to death. However, a benevolent visitor from another world has come to Earth to do emergency repairs on his ship. This is a more standard but quite good science fiction tale. It was nominated for a Hugo Award.

Harness states that he wrote "Probable Cause" in response to a request from noted editor John Campbell for "a story involving psi and the U. S. Supreme Court." Campbell rejected the story, which was printed elsewhere and then nominated for a Nebula Award. A man has been convicted for assassinating the President, based on evidence brought to light by a reported clairvoyant. Is such evidence acceptable? The members of the Court, most of them portrayed in some detail, must ponder this question. This is another fine story.

There is another court case to be settled in "George Washington Slept Here." A bridge is being built. Someone who appears to be a young woman hires an attorney to stop this. Part of the bridge will rest on a rock, but, the woman says, the rock, an artificial creation by alien beings, will disappear if that kind of weight is put upon it. She knows this because she is also an artificial creation of those alien beings, and she believes that she too will vanish if the rock does. What she fears, though, is that workers on the bridge will be killed. She tells her lawyer that she has been on Earth for thousands of years; she once had an affair with George Washington. She and her extremely sympathetic lawyer become lovers. This is one more very good story.

There is still another legal matter under consideration in yet another fine tale, "Lethary Fair," appearing for the first time in this book. The narrator is a lawyer in Lethary, a province in what is currently the southwestern United States, in the year 2198. He is assigned, much against his will, to undertake the defense in a sort of traffic accident. His client is a two-headed alien, who made an emergency landing of his spaceship, killing an old Buddhist monk and crushing "a very beautiful geisha android owned by the Sixtrees Bar-Del-O." This quite complicated matter is resolved to the satisfaction of almost all the parties involved, including some that the reader is not likely to suspect could be satisfied. This story is, obviously, not entirely serious.

"The Rose" is the longest story in the book and was originally published under the description "Complete Novel." There is an informative and touching introduction to this story. Among other things, it states that "The Rose" was turned down by "every SF market in the U.S." and finally appeared in Authentic Science Fiction, a British periodical. In 2004, "The Rose" was nominated for what is known as a "Retro-Hugo Award" for the best science fiction novella of 1953. It was also the title story in a 1966 collection of three tales by Charles Harness.

"The tale (as indeed the story itself says)," states Harness in his introduction, "is plotted around a short story, 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' by Oscar Wilde." And in Harness's "The Rose," a character says:

"The story's straight out of Oscar Wilde, isn't it? As I recall, the student needs a red rose as admission to the dance, but his garden contains only white roses. A foolish, if sympathetic, nightingale thrusts her heart against a thorn on a white rose stem, and the resultant ill-advised transfusion produces a red rose...and a dead nightingale. Isn't that about all there is to it?"

But in this tale, there is far more to it. Anna van Tuyl is a psychiatrist and a ballerina, who has been writing a score for a ballet based on Wilde's story. Not quite writing it, however, but remembering it - remembering it from a series of dreams. But when she dreams, she always awakens before hearing the music that accompanies the death of the nightingale.

Anna has another problem as well, a truly terrible one. Her body is transforming strangely. She has slowly developed what appear to be incipient horns on her head and a hump on her back.

Anna goes to meet a man, Ruy Jacques, who might produce her ballet. They meet outdoors in the Via, an area devoted to artists of all kinds. The man also has growths like horns and a hump on his back. They dance together. She returns home.

The next day Anna goes to an appointment with Martha Jacques, the beautiful, brilliant wife of Ruy. Mrs. Jacques wants to hire Anna to treat her husband; he is no longer able to read and write. Martha Jacques is working on a set of equations for Sciomnia, the ultimate scientific work, "the final summation of all physical and biological knowledge." The plotted equations resemble a picture of a rose. Martha is working with the sinister National Security Bureau.

The main subject of the story is the relative importance of art and science. Martha Jacques and the "Security" forces represent science. Anna, Ruy, and the other sympathetic characters in the story are devoted to art.

And, of course, Harness, despite his scientific training, is himself an artist. Here is one paragraph from "The Rose":

Now it was a mild evening in June, in the time of the full blooming of the roses, and the Via floated in a heady, irresistible tide of attar. It got into the tongues of the children and lifted their laughter and shouts an octave. It stained the palettes of the artists along the sidewalks, so that, despite the bluish glare of the artificial lights, they could paint only in delicate crimsons, pinks, yellows, and whites. The petalled current swirled through the side-shows and eternally new exhibits and gave them a veneer of perfection; it eddied through the canvas flap of the vendress of love philters and erased twenty years from her face. It brushed a scented message against the responsive mouths of innumerable pairs of lovers, blinding them to the appreciative gaze of those who stopped to watch them.

The ending of the tale, although not unexpected, is quite affecting.

I need to include some praise for the lovely, striking dust jacket illustration by James Stanley Daugherty. It shows a chessboard pattern, with pictures, words, or symbols in each of the light squares and a subtle picture of a woman revealed in some of the dark squares. Note, too, that the red and white roses are patterned with just a slight difference.

This is, on the whole, a very good collection. My favorite story here is the title one, but I think that most of the others are also fine.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought it for "The Alchemist". Disappointed that none of the Spardleton stories appear