The failure of reality to provide a Luc Bresson movie version of The Paradox Men is UNACCEPTABLE.

Surveillance woodcut catches AK
in the act of stealing biscuits

A recent optimistic stock-take of the Chocolate Hobnob situation in the Riddled tearoom found the tin to contain, not biscuits, nor the usual empty space, but a communiqué from Messrs Trahison & Clerisy, the Riddled team of legal advisors. This is their preferred channel for delivering their reports and they pay no heed to our remonstrations that they should use the letterbox like everyone else. How it reached the tin is anyone's guess; the freshly-installed security system leaves us no wiser, for on close inspection the surveillance cameras proved to be constructed from duct-tape and old shoe boxes, and the vile Throgmorton will be hearing some harsh words about reimbursement of our moneys.

Forensic examination revealed the report to be written in the blood of some extinct species of mammal, in fine copperplate script, upon artisanal paper made from mummy wrappings (slightly scorched around the deckle), with an unidentifiable astrological sign for watermark. As is the legal custom. It apprised us of a breakthrough in our long-standing campaign to break the copyright stranglehold maintained by the estate of the late Charles L. Harness, on forms of sensory-bombardment information-overload education machines, based on the mentat's Microfilm Mind's data-immersion interface in The Paradox Men:

We have consistently insisted that Harness' priority for the Microfilm Mind is vitiated by the existence of prior art, in the form of Vannevar Bush's Memex desk.

Evidently our case is bolstered by support from an unexpected direction: namely, the history of autism.

[Asperger] was literally trying to save the lives of the kids in his clinic from the Nazis. [...] He at one point suggested to the Nazis that these kids could make great codebreakers for the Reich. They apparently ignored that advice and set about to exterminate the children, but if you think about it, the Allies sort of employed that advice with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.

The picture painted here -- of Hans Asperger defending the savants in his care when the Aktion-T4 death-squad arrive for them* -- is clearly the inspiration for the scene in PM where Thurmond closes the Institute's clinic and pronounces a death sentence on the genius-level mutants it houses...

...thereby establishing a PATTERN of seeking inspiration from recent history. Counsel for the Harness estate will respond by attributing the parallels to mere coincidence, caused by synchronicity and by hitherto-untapped deposits of Narrativium. Trahison & Clerisy will respond by citing Cujusmodo and entering a plea of usufruct with multiple cozenage.


In Harness's 1981 revision of Paradox Men the Microfilm Mind became the Meganet Mind, which makes him sound like a magnate of file piracy, Kim Dot-Com's misanthropic older brother perhaps. Harness also added a few paragraphs of bafflegab about the evolutionary-leap maximum-acceleration awakening-silent-genes idea to make the plot mechanism marginally less creaky.

Nevertheless, we cling to the 1974 New English Library edition as the basis for the forthcoming Riddled Amateur Dramatic Society adaptation, because TRADITION.

-----------------------------------------------

* Meanwhile in non-Narrativium-driven reality, kids with autism / AS have no special compensatory endowment with mathematical gifts; there is no compelling evidence to retrospectively diagnose Turing as autistic; and the anecdote about Asperger's proposal has seen much embellishment since Tony Attwood reported it in 2007.