Harness's first story, "Time Trap" (1948), shows many of his recurring themes, among them art, time travel, and a hero undergoing a quasi-transcendental experience.
His first novel, The Paradox Men, was his most famous.[1] It was first published under the name Flight into Yesterday, as a novella in the May 1949 issue of Startling Stories (pp. 9–79). It was expanded to a full-length novel (Bouregy & Curl, 1953), and was renamed TheParadox Men by Donald Wollheim and reprinted as the first half of Ace Double #D-118 in 1955.[2][3] Much later Harness thanked Wollheim for the title that "turned out to be irresistible".[2] The "science-fiction classic"[4] is both "a tale dominated by space-opera extravagances" and "a severely articulate narrative analysis of the implications of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History".[1]Boucher and McComas described it as "fine swashbuckling adventure ... so infinitely intricate that you may never quite understand what it's about".[5]P. Schuyler Miller described it as "action-entertainment, fast-paced enough that you don't stop to bother with inconsistencies or improbabilities".[6]
In his introduction in the 1967 Four Square paperback reprint of the novel, Brian Aldiss terms it a major example of the "Widescreen Baroque" style in science fiction, and John Clute terms it "the kind of tale which transforms traditional space opera into an arena where a vast array of characters can act their hearts out, where anything can be said with a wink or dead seriously, and any kind of story be told".[1] In Trillion Year Spree, Aldiss and Wingrove report the novel "plays high, wide, and handsome with space and time, buzzes around the solar system like a demented hornet, [and] is witty, profound, and trivial all in one breath".[7]The Paradox Men features the concept of force fields which protect people against high-velocity weapons like guns but not against knives or swords, an idea later used in Frank Herbert's Dune (1965).[8]
In 1953, Harness also published his most famous single story, "The Rose", which first appeared in the British magazine Authentic Science Fiction, then as the main novella in a UK mass-market paperback collection assembled and introduced by Michael Moorcock. The story did not appear in the United States until 1969.[1]
Other Harness' stories include "An Ornament to his Profession", "The Alchemist" and "Stalemate in Space". His story "The New Reality" has been called "SF's best Adam & Eve story" by Brian Stableford. His novel Redworld is one of the very few science fiction novels in which all characters are aliens.
