Born in 1915 in Colorado City, a little town in West Texas, Charles Harness grew up at "Riverside," a few miles outside town on the Colorado River and surrounded by mesquite, cactus and sandstorms.  (His mother tried to grow honeysuckle on an arbor.)  "It laughed forlornly and died."

"Centipedes," Charles has written "were five inches long.  Shake out your shoes every morning to make sure they harbored no 'Stinging lizards' (scorpions).  My big brother Billy was an artist; he sketched water moccasins wreathed languidly in the river brambles.  My older sister and I bounced rubber balls against the sunny side of the house, trying to hit tarantulas that had crawled up on the warm cinder blocks.   These memories have led to stories about spiders: Raq in THE RING OF RITORNEL; the aliens in The Araqnid Widow; Atropos in THE VENETIAN COURT.  Some evening Dad would stand on the front porch looking at the western sky, wondering if that ominous black cloud would drop a funnel, or at other times listening to the woman screaming upriver.  Except, he explained, it wasn't a woman, it was a panther, and 'you kids had better sleep inside tonight.' "

Later the family moved to Fort Worth. "During my boyhood there I got interested in chemistry and radio.   My pals and I had a chem lab in a backyard shack.  If you could last five minutes (by guess nobody had a watch), you were a member.  Radio: I built a crystal set, then a one-tube set.  We bought no parts, everything was scrounged, salvaged, borrowed.  We didn't even have earphones.  We used an old telephone receiver we found in a vacant house.  First  reception: Tiptoe through the Tulips. ... We broadcast, too, using an old Ford spark coil as oscillator.  Morse code only, of course.  The best times for this was Saturday afternoons, when the TCU football games were being broadcast.  The spark coil covered the entire electromagnetic band, and the neighborhood response was terrific. ...

"In high school I co-edited the school paper with William Barney, subsequently Texas poet laureate.  I also in high school I tried my hand at short stories because (as) my brother Billy wrote short stories in his English class at TCU  and (b) I wanted to see whether I could (I couldn't), and (c) because my journalism teacher was giving a course in short story writing....

"And so if Fort Worth I finished high school and got my first full-time job (in a paper warehouse   in the red light district).  Simultaneously I attended TCU's night school on a ministerial scholarship....Firstly because we were poor, and it was the only way I could get to college.  Also, I had (then) a genuine piety and associated Christian convictions....

"Later I got a job as a fingerprint clerk in the Fort Worth police department, and in that capacity I had the pleasure of keeping in touch with wold friends from both the district and the seminary.  I have tried to recapture some of this happy earthy times of serial and jail in REDWORD....

"Billy died of  inoperable brain tumors when he was twenty-six.  He's a major character in several of my novels: Ruy Jacques in The Rose, Omere in THE RING OF RITORNEL and himself in THE CATALYST.  The last line in THE PARADOX MEN is a salute to Billy.

"But on to Washington, D.C., and 10 years with the U.S.  Government.  There I married Nell White, the prettiest and smartest girl in my high school class and my college sweetheart.  In Washington I got a B.S. in chemistry, then an LL.B. (Both from George Washington University), became a patent lawyer and a father."

Nell, who died in 1996, and Charles had two children and one grandchild.  He worked full time as a patent attorney for thirty-five years, writing SF --sporadically   frequently when he need the money.  He says he'll quit "as soon as I come to a good stopping place."

 Adapted from Authors' Note
THE PARADOX MEN
Crown SF Classics edition, 1984

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A Few Words from Charles's Work

Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall mirror.
        Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.
        As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman forced the great glass squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes.  And there resemblance to past hours ceased.  She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure.  She could not.  For her eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.
        Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind had shrieked its warning.  Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her toes as if to turn and leap away.  Then gradually she straightened.  She must force herself to go through with it.  She might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness, twice in one lifetime.  It must be now.
        She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.
        Somber eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools ploughed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper   the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders.  The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defense against unpredictable pain.  The cheeks seemed bloodless having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.
        As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly gray hair from two tumorous bulges   like incipient horns.  As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.
        Then, by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of that misshapen image.  She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she.  That profile, as if seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering metaphor paralyzed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.
        In a vague way, she realized that she had discovered what she had set out to discover.  She was ugly.  She was even very ugly.
        The change must have been gradual, too slow to say of any one day: Yesterday I was not ugly.  But even eyes that hungered for deception could no longer deny the cumulative evidence.
        So slow   and yet so fast.  It seemed only yesterday that had found her face down on Matthew Bell's examination table, biting savagely at a little pillow as his gnarled fingertips probed grimly at her upper thoracic vertebrae.
        Well, then, she was ugly.  But she'd not give in to self-pity.  To hell with what she looked like!  To hell with mirrors!
        On sudden impulse she seized her balancing tripod with both hands, closed her eyes, and swung.
        The tinkling of falling mirror glass had hardly ceased when a harsh and gravelly voice hailed her from the office.  "Bravo!"
        She dropped the practice tripod and whirled, aghast.  "Matt.!"
        "Just thought it was time to come in.  But if you want to bawl a little, I'll go back out and wait.  No?"  Without loading directly at her face or pausing for a reply, he tossed a packet on the table.  "There it is, Honey, if I could write a ballet score like your Nightingale and the Rose, I wouldn't care if my spine was knotted in a figure eight.
        "You're crazy," she muttered stonily, unwilling to admit that she was both pleased and curious.  "You don't know what it means to have once been able to pirouette, to balance en arabesque.  And anyway"   she looked at him from the corner of her eye  "how could anyone tell whether the score's good?  There's no Finale as yet.  It isn't finished."
        "Neither is the Mona Lisa, Kublai Khan, or a certain symphony by Schubert."
        "But this is different.  A plotted ballet requires an integrated sequence of events leading up to a climax  to a Finale.  I haven't figured out the ending.  Did you notice I left a thirty-eight-beat hiatus just before the Nightingale dies?  I still need a death song for her.  She's entitled to die with a flourish."  She couldn't tell him about The Dream   that she always awoke just before that death song began.