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Cybele, With Bluebonnets
Outstanding Copy - With A Laid In Signed Bookplate. A First Edition, First Printing. Book Is In Fine Condition. Boards Are Clean, Not Bumped. Fore Edges Are Clean. Interior Is Clean And Legible. Not Remaindered. Dust Jacket Is In Fine Condition. Not Chipped Or Crinkled. Not Price Clipped. Dust Jacket Is Covered By Mylar Brodart. Thanks And Enjoy.
160 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2002
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About the author
Charles L. Harness
92 books24 followersAlso credited as Charles Harness.
Charles Leonard Harness was born December 29, 1915 in Colorado City TX. After an abortive stint at Texas Christian University, studying to be a preacher, he moved on to George Washington University in Washington DC, where he received a B.S. degree in 1942, and a law degree in 1946. He married in 1938, and he and wife Nell have a daughter and a son. He worked as a mineral economist for the US Bureau of Mines, 1941-47, then became a patent attorney, first with American Cyanamid (1947-1953), then with W.R. Grace & Co. (1953-1981). His first story, ‘‘Time Trap’’, appeared in Astounding (8/48), and he went on to write a number of well-regarded SF stories, many involving future trials and patent attorneys. A series of patent office spoofs/stories (some co-written with Theodore L. Thomas) appeared under the pseudonym Leonard Lockhard, beginning with ‘‘Improbable Profession’’ (Astounding 9/52). His first published novel, Flight Into Yesterday (aka The Paradox Men), first appeared as a 1949 novella, and was expanded in 1953. The Rose, his most famous novella, appeared as a book in 1966. It was followed by Wagnerian space opera The Ring of Ritornel (1968), Wolfhead (1978), The Catalyst (1980), Firebird (1981), The Venetian Court (1982), Redworld (1986), Krono (1988), Lurid Dreams (1990), and Lunar Justice (1991). His short fiction has been collected in An Ornament to His Profession (1998), which includes not only ‘‘The Rose’’ but a new novella as well.
Charles Leonard Harness was born December 29, 1915 in Colorado City TX. After an abortive stint at Texas Christian University, studying to be a preacher, he moved on to George Washington University in Washington DC, where he received a B.S. degree in 1942, and a law degree in 1946. He married in 1938, and he and wife Nell have a daughter and a son. He worked as a mineral economist for the US Bureau of Mines, 1941-47, then became a patent attorney, first with American Cyanamid (1947-1953), then with W.R. Grace & Co. (1953-1981). His first story, ‘‘Time Trap’’, appeared in Astounding (8/48), and he went on to write a number of well-regarded SF stories, many involving future trials and patent attorneys. A series of patent office spoofs/stories (some co-written with Theodore L. Thomas) appeared under the pseudonym Leonard Lockhard, beginning with ‘‘Improbable Profession’’ (Astounding 9/52). His first published novel, Flight Into Yesterday (aka The Paradox Men), first appeared as a 1949 novella, and was expanded in 1953. The Rose, his most famous novella, appeared as a book in 1966. It was followed by Wagnerian space opera The Ring of Ritornel (1968), Wolfhead (1978), The Catalyst (1980), Firebird (1981), The Venetian Court (1982), Redworld (1986), Krono (1988), Lurid Dreams (1990), and Lunar Justice (1991). His short fiction has been collected in An Ornament to His Profession (1998), which includes not only ‘‘The Rose’’ but a new novella as well.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 10, 2024
Overall, I liked it, and it seemed unlike anything I’d read before. The first half felt more disturbing—similar to how contemplating eternity is disturbing—than I’d expected. I think I’m unusually sensitive to that sort of thing, and it isn’t a complaint at all; art that’s disturbing is generally good art. The second half was more fun but seemed less cohesive. At times, it felt like a vehicle for telling unrelated cool chemistry stories. But who doesn’t enjoy a good chemistry story? Anyway, I did like it.
November 1, 2023
How could I resist a novel with an illustration of the Periodic Table on its front cover? Still less “a book for chemists who might appreciate magical realism” as the publisher’s prefatory lines have it. It could have been designed for me.
Don’t let that put you off though; it’s also a very powerful and intricate novel exploring those eternal themes of love, sex and death – with a very unusual ghost.
Charles L Harness is one of my favourite SF writers of the last century but due to the fact that it’s quite rare I only bought this book recently. It was, then, a little disconcerting that in the first page we find narrator, Joe Barnes, mentally undressing his female Chemistry teacher Miss Wilson (Miss Cybele Wilson) down to nothing but stockings, garters and low-heeled shoes as she enters class. Adolescent male fantasy no doubt but a bit much.
There is a plot strand relating to a cup said to be the Holy Grail (the “real” one was lost in the Atlantic in its evacuation from Europe during the Great War.) Joe takes a job modelling for artists and recognises, though the face is turned away, one of the pictures the tutor rotates on the studio’s walls as being a nude Cybele holding the cup. A mystery about the cup’s disappearance from the religious institution where it is held is resolved by Joe’s knowledge of the refractive index of borosilicate glass.
Cybele becomes the love of his life and a major influence on it, her characteristic scent of bluebonnets (the State Flower of Texas apparently) coming to him at significant turning points. She inspires him with a love of Chemistry and encourages his thirst for knowledge. She is a strong character but her prognostications about the future invite suspicion from the school authorities. It is not until well after he has left school, however, that they get together and that not for long as she has cancer. Here Harness inserts Joe’s thoughts on his loss. “And life goes on. It goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere. We begin, and end, in the middle.” At this point there is still half the book to go with many more opportunities for Cybele to affect Joe’s progress through life.
Joe was growing up in the 1930s and there is a lot of incidental detail about life in small town US in those times. Cybele’s background was unconventional, her mother was a madam in a local house of ill repute whose activities are policed by arrangement of times to raid the premises. A fair amount of Chemistry adorns the pages but I’m sure the details will not faze the average reader.
All of this is interspersed with incidents of what can only be termed magical realism. Young Joe’s discovery of a millions of years old skimming stone which skips from the river into a cave where something spooks him as he goes to retrieve it, the panther which saves his brother from a snake, the voice which he hears warning him to run from a lab accident, the unusual circumstances surrounding his daughter’s birth.
Almost innocent at times, Cybele, with Bluebonnets is a wonderful book; insightful, humane, knowledgeable, rueful. Here is a human life in all its glory and pain.
Don’t let that put you off though; it’s also a very powerful and intricate novel exploring those eternal themes of love, sex and death – with a very unusual ghost.
Charles L Harness is one of my favourite SF writers of the last century but due to the fact that it’s quite rare I only bought this book recently. It was, then, a little disconcerting that in the first page we find narrator, Joe Barnes, mentally undressing his female Chemistry teacher Miss Wilson (Miss Cybele Wilson) down to nothing but stockings, garters and low-heeled shoes as she enters class. Adolescent male fantasy no doubt but a bit much.
There is a plot strand relating to a cup said to be the Holy Grail (the “real” one was lost in the Atlantic in its evacuation from Europe during the Great War.) Joe takes a job modelling for artists and recognises, though the face is turned away, one of the pictures the tutor rotates on the studio’s walls as being a nude Cybele holding the cup. A mystery about the cup’s disappearance from the religious institution where it is held is resolved by Joe’s knowledge of the refractive index of borosilicate glass.
Cybele becomes the love of his life and a major influence on it, her characteristic scent of bluebonnets (the State Flower of Texas apparently) coming to him at significant turning points. She inspires him with a love of Chemistry and encourages his thirst for knowledge. She is a strong character but her prognostications about the future invite suspicion from the school authorities. It is not until well after he has left school, however, that they get together and that not for long as she has cancer. Here Harness inserts Joe’s thoughts on his loss. “And life goes on. It goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere. We begin, and end, in the middle.” At this point there is still half the book to go with many more opportunities for Cybele to affect Joe’s progress through life.
Joe was growing up in the 1930s and there is a lot of incidental detail about life in small town US in those times. Cybele’s background was unconventional, her mother was a madam in a local house of ill repute whose activities are policed by arrangement of times to raid the premises. A fair amount of Chemistry adorns the pages but I’m sure the details will not faze the average reader.
All of this is interspersed with incidents of what can only be termed magical realism. Young Joe’s discovery of a millions of years old skimming stone which skips from the river into a cave where something spooks him as he goes to retrieve it, the panther which saves his brother from a snake, the voice which he hears warning him to run from a lab accident, the unusual circumstances surrounding his daughter’s birth.
Almost innocent at times, Cybele, with Bluebonnets is a wonderful book; insightful, humane, knowledgeable, rueful. Here is a human life in all its glory and pain.
December 13, 2008
The late Charles L. Harness was a Washington, D.C. patent attorney and also a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy. This haunting novel, set in Depression-era Texas and Washington D.C. during World War II, is his most overtly autobiographical. A subtle ghost story, in which all the seemingly fantastic events have rational explanations, Cybele, with Bluebonnets is about the coming of age of young Joe Barnes and Cybele, the lost love who continues to guide him throughout his life. Gene Wolfe said about this book: "There are perhaps a thousand wonderful books. Most of us are fortunate if we so much as hear the titles of them in the course of a lifetime. Very few of us ever touch the covers of more than half a dozen. This is one of them." I couldn't put it more eloquently.
September 1, 2017
Charles Harness earned degrees as both a chemist and a lawyer, so it was not surprising that he became a patent attorney. He also became an excellent science fiction writer.
Cybele, with Bluebonnets is fantasy rather than science fiction. It was Harness's last novel, published in 2002, three years before his death at the age of 89. This is a deeply religious book; a substantial portion involves the inhabitants of a monastery, Christian but neither Protestant or Catholic. In the monastery is a cup which is thought by some to be the Holy Grail.
The book is also deeply Texan. Although the second half of the book is set in Washington, DC, Texas is where the book's heart is. For example:
To a Texan, history (meaning Texas history) is 90% of life. They teach it in grade school - the coming of the Austins, the wave of immigrants into Mexican Texas, the treacherous Mexicans, the Alamo...
And as the song Gulf Coast Highway says, "This is the only place on Earth blue bonnnets grow."
The book is also deeply scientific. Chemistry plays a very large and significant role.
Cybele, with Bluebonnets is the story of Joe Barnes, the narrator of the book. Joe grows up poor in Texas in the 1920's and 1930's. As a child, he decides that he wants to be a chemist when he grows up. Later he studies chemistry in high school. He is sixteen and his chemistry teacher, Cybele Wilson, is twenty-three. After Joe graduates from high school, he and Cybele become lovers.
This is quite a short novel, less than 150 pages. Harness manages to put an amazing amount of fine and very moving fiction in those pages, though.
Cybele, with Bluebonnets is fantasy rather than science fiction. It was Harness's last novel, published in 2002, three years before his death at the age of 89. This is a deeply religious book; a substantial portion involves the inhabitants of a monastery, Christian but neither Protestant or Catholic. In the monastery is a cup which is thought by some to be the Holy Grail.
The book is also deeply Texan. Although the second half of the book is set in Washington, DC, Texas is where the book's heart is. For example:
To a Texan, history (meaning Texas history) is 90% of life. They teach it in grade school - the coming of the Austins, the wave of immigrants into Mexican Texas, the treacherous Mexicans, the Alamo...
And as the song Gulf Coast Highway says, "This is the only place on Earth blue bonnnets grow."
The book is also deeply scientific. Chemistry plays a very large and significant role.
Cybele, with Bluebonnets is the story of Joe Barnes, the narrator of the book. Joe grows up poor in Texas in the 1920's and 1930's. As a child, he decides that he wants to be a chemist when he grows up. Later he studies chemistry in high school. He is sixteen and his chemistry teacher, Cybele Wilson, is twenty-three. After Joe graduates from high school, he and Cybele become lovers.
This is quite a short novel, less than 150 pages. Harness manages to put an amazing amount of fine and very moving fiction in those pages, though.
November 2, 2012
A charming story that meanders at times - just the way a real conversation would. Well-written and an easy read.
My only critique is that there are some jumps in time/space that catch you a little off-guard, but once you sort it out, it's easy to forgive Harness, who has crafted a wonderful tale.
My only critique is that there are some jumps in time/space that catch you a little off-guard, but once you sort it out, it's easy to forgive Harness, who has crafted a wonderful tale.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews