HARNESS, Charles (Leonard)

(1915-)

   US patent attorney and writer, born in Texas. His first published story was "Time Trap" for ASF in 1948, a convoluted time-loop story involving the working of tremendous forces off-stage and a quasitranscendental experience as the hero goes back in time to remake the world. His subsequent output shows a remarkable consistency in echoing and developing these themes. His first two novels, Flight into Yesterday (1949 Startling Stories; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men) and THE RING OF RITORNEL(1968), feature cycles in time and HEROES who undergo transcendental metamorphoses in order to manipulate their own destinies and that of the human race; both novels are shamelessly melodramatic, and have an obvious kinship with the work of A.E. VAN VOGT. Shorter works in the same vein include "The New Reality" (1950) - sf's best ADAM AND EVE story - and "Stalemate in Space" (1949; vt "Stalemate in Time"). The first phase ofhis career (1948-53) may well have ended because of his failure to sell the remarkable novella "The Rose" (1953 AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION; title story of The Rose (coll 1966 UK), which also includes "The New Reality" and "The Chessplayers") to a US market. This striking allegory of the opposed worldviews of science and the ARTS is a memorable exemplar of the particular kind of SUPERMAN story which represents future human EVOLUTION in metamorphic terms. Its reprinting in the 1960s was the result of the interest in CLH's work of Michael MOORCOCK, who reprinted several CLH stories in NEW WORLDS, and this may have been responsible for Harness's second burst of creativity, which produced THE RING OF RITORNEL and several shorter works drawing on his experience as a lawyer, including "An Ornament to his Profession" (1966) and "The Alchemist" (1966). (CLH hadearlier drawn on this experience in writing whimsical articles and stories for ASF as Leonard Lockhard, sometimes working in collaboration with Theodore L. THOMAS.)CLH returned to sf writing for a third time with thefuturistic infernal romance Wolfhead (1977-8 FSF; 1978), one of several sf novels to borrow heavily from DANTE ALIGHIERI and to recast the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. He has been moderately prolific since then, aided byhis retirement from legal work in 1981. The Catalyst (1980) is one of several CLH stories featuring quasimiraculous scientific discoveries made in frank defiance of supposedly rational procedures. The transcendental time-looping of his earlier novels is reiterated in Firebird (1981), Krono (1988), and - in an un-space-operatic fashion - in Lurid Dreams (1990),whose out-of-body time traveller meets up with Edgar Allan POE. Redworld (1986) is an eccentric Bildungsroman set on a peculiar alien world, whichmay be in part a transfiguration of the author's early life. His fondness for outrageously melodramatic courtroom dramas in which absolutely everything is rigged against the defendant, first displayed in "Probable Cause" (1968), is echoed in The Venetian Court (1982) and Lunar Justice(1991).CLH is an original, stylish and imaginatively audacious writer whose relative neglect is difficult to understand. His most recent books may not have quite the scope and exuberant panache of his earlier efforts, but it is nevertheless unfortunate that the works of such a colourful and highly readable writer should still be condemned, with one recent exception, to appear only as ephemeral paperback originals. Despite his one-time fashionability in the UK, none of his recent works has been published there.

   BS

   About the author: Charles L. Harness: Attorney in Space: A Working Bibliography (1992 chap) by Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.

   See also: COMPUTERS; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ESCHATOLOGY; FORCE FIELD; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; HISTORY IN SF; JUPITER;MEDICINE; METAPHYSICS; MOON; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; RECURSIVE SF; SCIENTISTS; SUN; TIME PARADOXES; WEAPONS.