The same review appears in many places, easy to tag by the misspelled word “champsioned” which no one corrects. And the story is more complicated than told in the thumbnails or it would be merely the play-by-play of a tug-of-war. The author invested considerable thought in the society in which the characters are acting. They are consistent with their time and place but not ours. They do not say the things we would say if we were thrust into that social context. The society is different than ours but largely recognizable. The narrator brings us into their multifaceted conflict.
"Composer and dancer Anna van Tuyl is working on her masterpiece, a work she has titled "The Rose". Her progress is stymied, however, when her body begins suddenly to change. For no knowable reason, she begins to grow strange protuberances, her body warping more day by day. Desperate to complete her symphony before her life becomes subsumed by these growths, she encounters a painter suffering from the same affliction.
Ruy Jacques is an artist, famed for his works and full of inspiration despite his condition. His wife is a scientist, a woman of logic, working to build the perfect weapon. While Anna at first believes she has found a saviour and kindred spirit in Ruy, she instead finds herself in the middle of a tense battle between art and science, with building jealousy and resentment.
Is the true goal the completion of her work, or the possibility of a cure? Is it better to seek immortality through their art, or a full life through science?
Award-winning author Charles Harness' lost classic was rediscovered by Michael Moorcock more than a decade after it was first published, and champsioned by him to great acclaim. IT was awarded the Retro-Hugo award in 2004. "https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rose/NAUaCgAAQBAJ
Anna van Tuyl is composing a ballet, The Student and the Rose, based on Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. Anna van Tuyl is also a psychogeneticist who has a psychotherapist of her own. He follows her into her assigned quest, a life-and-death game into which her government conscripted her. She turns a corner at a street circus and there he is. He observes her at a literary party and intrudes on her confrontation against her opponent. Coming at her from another angle is another government agent, an undercover assassin. She dodges them to confront her primary opponent: Martha Jacques, the wife of the man whom she was assigned to seduce. The government’s interest in Ruy Jacques and Anna van Tuyl is that Martha Jacques must not be distracted while she is completing the design of a weapon so powerful that it will not just kill everyone on Earth, it will alter the spacetime continuum out to the colonized stellar systems. The device is based on a mathematical thesis which displays as a Rosette when plotted on polar coordinates. This is an expression of the philosophy of Sciomnia, a name dropped without introduction and excused without leave. Her primary distraction is her husband’s sequence of girlfriends. Anna van Tuyl must capture Ruy Jacques’s heart with extreme platonism so that he will not want anyone else and at the same they can assure Martha that nothing is going on. Unfortunately, they are both mutants with similar horns and hunched backs, perhaps able to perceive magnetic signatures that carry information. Those signatures are as ubiquitous as metal objects in a future modern society. The impenetrable steel door announces the combination to its lock. Ruy Jacques perceives that reality but is optically blind to our experiences. Anna van Tuyl has the same ability, only she is a less-evolved creature of his type. They also display physical evidence of a pineal third eye known only to the greatest mystics. They are an entirely new and rising post-human species. Even though it is established that Anna van Tuyl is less developed than Ruy Jacques, she hatches first. The bulb on her back splits open and something comes out which is never mentioned again. This does not happen to Ruy.
“The Rose” was first published by Authentic Science Fiction. So, the author’s job was made a little easier. The early mention of food heated in an atomic warmer brings you into this future with its visigraph, wire recorder, visor, and electrostat. Early in the story, some of the gadgets had been developed “in the forties” perhaps the 2040s or 2140s. Another time marker is placed by the mention of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, written in 1893, the music having endured for a hundred years, placing the story in 1993. However, at the end, it is revealed that this is the year 2437.
The novella is easily labeled for its clearly announced argument between Art and Science; Harness gives point-counterpoint as the antagonists make their cases. One assertion is that our material progress may not derive from rational science or passionate art but from occasional global warmings.
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