Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Uneven, but interesting, October 13, 1998
This is one of those stories that has several mysterious buried in the plot that all come together at the very end. The premise is exceptional and the look that we get into a future imperial America is fascinating. Unfortunately the plot seems uneven in places. As an example a character who gets tortured at the end of one chapter suddenly reappers free in the middle of the next chapter with little explaination of what happened in between. The book is full of small "problems" like this and that makes it a bit annoying to read. Also the explaination of the structure of the universe is confusing and requires you to read it over several times. That said, the time travel plot is incredible and will leave you thinking about it for days after the book is done. My favorite part of this book, though, is the description of the solar bases and the sociology of what goes on there. Yeah, you heard me right they have bases on the sun in this book. If you want to find out why and how such a thing is possible read the book. Overall it is a good read.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A MINDBLOWER, July 25, 2000
I picked up this book because it had been compared to Alfred Bester's "The Stars, My Destination," one of my favorite sci-fi novels, AND because it is listed as one of the Top 100 sci-fi novels in David Pringle's excellent overview book. Happily, I found the comparison to be a fair one, and the rating to be just. This is one terrific science fiction novel, as fast paced and colorful as the Bester novel, and featuring a similar use of colorful characters and extravagant imagination. It is really quite impressive how Charles Harness manages to incorporate some fantastic surprise or bit of mind-blowing scientific hypothesizing into every single chapter. Einsteinian theories of the universe, Toynbeean history and non-Aristotelian philosophy are all mixed into a swashbuckling and fast-moving pulp story, with a backdrop of a technologically advanced society on the decline. The story jumps from the Earth to the moon to Mercury and finally to a "solarion," a station that hovers over a sunspot to process the energy of the sun itself. It's all wild and improbable and quite irresistible stuff, if you're game. I highly recommend it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, convoluted in a fascinating way, moving, July 27, 2006
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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