Charles Harness

Charles Leonard Harness (December 29, 1915 – September 20, 2005) was an American science fiction writer. He was born in Colorado City, Texas and grew up just outside it, then later in Fort Worth. He earned degrees in chemistry and law from George Washington University and worked as a patent attorney in Connecticut & Washington, DC from 1947 to 1981. Several of Harness' works draw on his background as a lawyer.

Harness' first story, "Time Trap" (1948), is unusual for a first story in that it shows many of his recurring themes, among them art, time travel, and a hero undergoing a quasi-transcendental experience.

His first novel was his most famous, Flight into Yesterday. It was first as a novella in the May 1949 issue of Startling Stories (pp. 9–79), was expanded as a full-length novel (Bouregy & Curl, 1953), and was renamed Paradox Men by Donald Wollheim for reprint as the first half of Ace Double #D-118 in 1955. Much later Harness thanked Wollheim for the title that "turned out to be irresistible". The "science-fiction classic" is both "a tale dominated by space-opera extravagances" and "a severely articulate narrative analysis of the implications of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History."Boucher and McComas described it as "fine swashbuckling adventure ... so infinitely intricate that you may never quite understand what it's about."P. Schuyler Miller described it as "action-entertainment, fast-paced enough that you don't stop to bother with inconsistencies or improbabilities."

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