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eBook Paradox Men download

by Charles Leonard Harness

Charles Leonard Harness Science Fiction English

ISBN: 0450029964
Author: Charles Leonard Harness
Publisher: New English Library Ltd; New edition edition (June 3, 1976)
Language: English
Pages: 160
ePub: 1823 kb
Fb2: 1921 kb
Rating: 4.2
Other formats: txt lit lrf mobi
Category: Pseudoscience
Subcategory: Science Fiction

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Charles L. Harness’s most popular book is The Paradox Men.

Books by Charles L. Harness. Showing 30 distinct works. The Paradox Men by. Charles L. Harness, Brian W. Aldiss (Introduction).

Paradox Men Paperback – June 3, 1976. by Charles Leonard Harness (Author). The Paradox Men should probably be read twice, not just because the plot is sufficiently complex that you may have missed something the first time, but because the end is really the beginning

Paradox Men Paperback – June 3, 1976. The Paradox Men should probably be read twice, not just because the plot is sufficiently complex that you may have missed something the first time, but because the end is really the beginning. I had not read anything by Charles Harness before, though I thought I was familiar with all the great SF writers, so this was a pleasant surprise. If you like fast-paced, imaginative, hard sci-fi, this is superbly done.

Harness, Charles L. The paradox men. (Classics of modern science fiction; v. 7. Beginning in 1950, science fiction in book form began to make its appearance, and some of the books retrieved the magazine short stories and serials in the form of collections, anthologies and novels. As time went on, however, it became clear that the vast majority of science-fiction books were in paperback form, and these, too, were ephemeral. Their stay on the newsstands is not entirely calendar-bound, and they can withstand a bit more handling than periodicals can-but paperbacks tend to be, like magazines, throwaway items.

Charles L. Harness (1915-2005) Charles Leonard Harness was an American science fiction writer born in Colorado City, Texas. He earned degrees in chemistry and law from George Washington University and worked as a patent attorney from 1947 to 1981. Harness' background as a lawyer influenced several of his works. His first story, "Time Trap" was published in 1948 and drew on many themes that would recur in later stories: art, time travel and a hero undergoing a experience.

Charles Leonard Harness (December 29, 1915 – September 20, 2005) was an American science fiction writer. He was born in Colorado City, Texas and grew up just outside it, then later in Fort Worth. He earned degrees in chemistry and law from George Washington University and worked as a patent attorney in Connecticut & Washington, DC from 1947 to 1981. Several of Harness' works draw on his background as a lawyer. Harness died in 2005, at the age of 89, in North Newton, Kansas.

The Paradox Men. 227 printed pages. To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate.

Поиск книг BookFi BookSee - Download books for free. Harness Charles Leonard, Thomas Theodore Lockhard. The Paradox Men (Flight into Yesterday). Harness Charles L. Категория: fiction.

The Paradox Men. The free online library containing 500000+ books. Read books for free from anywhere and from any device. Listen to books in audio format instead of reading.

Read online books written by Harness Charles Leonard in our e-reader absolutely for free. He is also very well known as a wildlife artist, children's book illustrator and scratchboard artist. Author of The Professional Approach at ReadAnyBook. Most of his illustration work uses this technique, and he was long known as the only commercial artist who specialized in it. Among the books he has illustrated are The Wolfling and Rascal by Sterling North, the latter of which received a Newbery Honor and The Illustrated Dune by Frank Herbert. This last grew out of his work for Analog magazine, especially under John W. Campbell, Jr. and Ben Bova. Harness (1915-2005) Charles Leonard Harness was an American science fiction writer born in Colorado City, Texas

Charles L.

Comments: (7)

Erienan

Charles L Harness' The Paradox Men is a hodge-podge of 1950's sci-fi. Harness pulls out all the stops with everything, including the kitchen sink playing a role. The tale takes place in the future where an oligoarchy of wealthy 1%'ers have reinstated slavery along with voluntary servitude. This ruling class is opposed by a shadowy Robin Hood style band of thieves, stealing wealth to buy the freedom of slaves. Into this mix comes a man without a past who struggles to learn his place in this world. The action tends towards the swashbuckling.

The sci-fi elements include nearly everything. Space travel throughout the solar system is established including a mining operation around the sun. Thieves' bodies have been infused with a type of metal skin making bullets useless resulting in a return to swordplay (kinetic energy is the key). A human cyborg supercomputer is enlisted for strategy. Finally time travel appears possible with an eye to influencing early hominid development.

The story is a bit over the top most of the time as a result of insurgency intermixed with jewelry robbery (reminiscent of Superman hanging out to stop a mugger while nuclear annihilation looms). Three psychos are in charge and seem to stumble over themselves most of time with spies frequently in their midst. This one is mainly relevant for historical perspective on the sci-fi genre.

Eta

The Paradox Men should probably be read twice, not just because the plot is sufficiently complex that you may have missed something the first time, but because the end is really the beginning. I had not read anything by Charles Harness before, though I thought I was familiar with all the great SF writers, so this was a pleasant surprise. If you like fast-paced, imaginative, hard sci-fi, this is superbly done. Although written in 1948, most of the science holds up well, despite the dubious nature of a universe closed in both space and time and a spaceship going faster than light having infinite mass. (Actually, if you use the Lorentz-Fitgerald-Einstein equation on this, which Harness quotes, the mass becomes infinite only at the speed of light, and becomes imaginary at greater than light speed, whatever imaginary mass means.) The only real gaffe is when an astronomer says they detected a disturbance in a Magellanic cloud that occrred a few days ago, as the faster than light spaceship went through it. How, when it takes some hundred thousand years for any signal to reach us?
Harness, between action scenes, occasionally lapses into historical analysis, pushing the Toynbeean view of the decay of civilizations--his is set in a degenerate American Empire 200 years in the future, similar to the last days of Rome, with torture and a police state ruled by a despot. In plot and pacing, he reminds me most of Philip K. Dick, but while Dick's characters are full of self-doubt and anxiety, Harness's are superbly confidant, even while pulling off impossible feats or going to their deaths. They act with a certain fatalism, and, given that the whole story is a time loop, this makes sense, because everything that does happen, must happen. Even if you read this book merely for entertainment and ignore Harness's message that our civilization is on the slippery slope, it's well worth it.

Blackseeker

3.5 stars. Old school SF... this is probably the first book that ever had lightsabres in it.. of course this was way before Star Wars, so they aren't called lightsabres.

Nahelm

Implausible but fascinating all the way

Risky Strong Dromedary

The Paradox Men has become a classic in the SF field, for good reason. It was first published as "Flight Into Yesterday", in the May 1949 Startling Stories. This edition is slightly expanded and revised.

The Paradox Men is still Harness's most famous and most respected novel. The plot is complicated, but consistent, logical, and thematically sound. The characters are two-dimensional but interesting and involving. The action is well-done, and the scientific ideas are sometimes philosophical and thoughtful, and at other times wild, implausible, but still engaging. The basic story is of a Thief, Alar, who has appeared in Imperial America 5 years prior to the action of the story, with no memory of his past or identity. The Thieves work underground against the repressive society, using tech invented by their mysterious, dead, founder, Kennicot Muir. The key piece of Thief tech is armor which protects them against high velocity weapons (like projectile weapons), but not against swords and knives. Thus fencing is again a major skill. (Herbert swiped this notion for Dune, of course.) At the time of the action, various threads are converging: the plans of Imperial America to attack its Eurasian enemy, the Toynbee society's attempts to avoid the continuing historical cycle of civilizations rising and falling (they believe that the coming war will bring Toynbee Civilization 21 to an end: the next one will be Toynbee 22, hence Harness' original title (never used on a published version): Toynbee Twenty-Two), the completion of an experimental FTL starship, the relationship between the evil leaders of Imperial America and Keiris Muir, the enslaved widow of Kennicot Muir, and her attraction to Alar, the predictions of the computer enhanced human called The Meganet Mind (or the Microfilm Mind in the original). What a horrible sentence: but trying to summarize Harness can do that to you. Everything comes to a head with a trip to the surface of the Sun, and then a much stranger trip ...

I recommend it highly. It seems comparable in many ways to its near contemporary Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination: Harness probably had a more original mind than Bester's, and his themes seem a bit more ambitious, but he really couldn't write with him -- and I think it is because of the writing (both prose and pace) that the manic energy of the Bester book is more successfully sustained. Still, The Paradox Men remains a powerful and interesting novel, and such scenes as the final selfless act of Keiris are unmatched in SF.

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