Charles L. Harness's The Rose is a sci-fi romance loosely based on Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. It's also an evolution story, a kind of chess game of Science vs. Art, and a look into the process of creating a musical masterpiece entitled "Nightingale and the Rose." It has reams of great text:
"Science is functionally sterile; it creates nothing; it says nothing new. The scientist can never be more than a humble camp follower of the artist. There exists no scientific truism that hasn't been anticipated by creative art. The examples are endless. Uccello worked out mathematically the laws of perspective in the fifteenth century; but Kallicrates applied the same laws two thousand years before in designing the columns of the Parthenon. The Curies thought they invented the idea of 'half-life'--of a thing vanishing in proportion to it's residue. The Egyptians tuned their lyre-strings to dampen according to the same formula. Napier thought he invented logarithms--entirely overlooking the fact that the Roman brass workers flared their trumpets to follow a logarithmic curve."
"Boyle's gas law, Hooke's law of springs, Galileo's law of pendulums, and a host of similar hogwash simply state that that compression, kinetic energy, or whatever name you give it, is inversely proportional to the amount of it's displacement in the total system. Or, as the artist says, impact results from, and is proportional to, displacement of an object in it's milieu. Could the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet enthrall us if our minds hadn't been conditioned, held in check, and compressed in suspense by the preceding fourteen lines? Note how cleverly Donne's famous poem builds up to it's crash line, 'It tolls for thee!' By blood, sweat, and genius, the Elizabethans lowered the entropy of their creations in precisely the same manner and with precisely the same result as when Boyle compressed his gasses..."
This kind of discourse takes up much of the novella. I suppose what makes this story sci-fi is the scientist's quest for Sciomnia, or the highest possible aim of human endeavor, which for the scientist is the creation of the perfect weapon, and the "ability to control the minds and bodies of men." The artist tries to counter this power by the transformative power of art, and the mutation that only selfless love can manifest, as the characters vie for the title of homo superior, racing to a great climax and a performance of the 'Nightingale's death song':
"The melody spiraled heavenward on wings. It demanded no allegiance; it hurled no pronunciamento. It held a message, but one almost too glorious to be grasped. It was steeped in boundless aspiration, but it was at peace with man and universe. It sparkled humility, and in an abnegation there was grandeur. Its very incompleteness served to hint at its boundlessness."
The Rose is science fiction of a very playful and sophisticated style, far removed from the lumbering hardware of most space operas. The writing is intense, well crafted, and a joy to read. As an added bonus, Harness writes of an inconvenient truth, a concept borrowed decades later by another lover of sci-fi:
"Since the middle of the seventeenth century the mean temperature of New York City has been increasing at the rate of about one-tenth of a degree per year. In another century palm trees will be commonplace on Fifth Avenue."
The book has two other stories: "The Chessplayers," about a mouse that plays chess, (it's hysterical), and "The New Reality," a great Adam and Eve tale that asks a favorite sci-fi question, "what is reality?" The variety of rose depicted on the book's cover is called "hybrid-tea," which is yet another piece of fine trivia brought to you by Modernmoonman.
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