Algis Budrys

J-Sun

J-Sun

⚡
Joined
Oct 23, 2008
Messages
5,324
The Nebula nominees thread digressed into Budrys and that got me to thinking he deserved a non-obit thread of his own.

I first read Budrys' "Nobody Bothers Gus" in Judith Merrill's SF: The Best of the Best but I didn't follow up on him until, oddly, I read Charles Platt's interview with him in Dream Makers. (I had both Dream Makers volumes and idiotically sold them.) He sounded like such a fascinating guy that I just had to check him out. Looks like I first read Rogue Moon, which is a great start for his novels. He was also a famous critic, writing reviews for Galaxy (collected in Benchmarks) and F&SF (Benchmarks Continued) and also edited TomorrowSF. Fred Pohl talks about him several times on his blog (the best starting point is probably AJ).

My readings and rankings[1]:

  • Rogue Moon (1960)
  • Who? (1958)
  • Michaelmas (1977)
  • Entertainment (1997 collection, can be seen as exp vt of The Unexpected Dimension (1960))
  • Some Will Not Die (1961, rev vt of False Night (1954), further rev 1978)
  • The Falling Torch (1959)

The least of these is very good and enjoyable and they work their way up to "all-time classic". Not at all prolific, his books are action-packed while being very sober and philosophical - not in the pretentious or navel-gazing sense but in the sense of being acutely observed and concerned for what it's all about.

Anybody else a fan and have their favorites?

---
[1] I still have Hard Landing (1993) in the SBR and I've read through some of Benchmarks (1985 non-fiction) but haven't seriously sat down to read it yet.
 
I read Rogue Moon recently and it was fantastic. I think I gave it a 4/5 on goodreads. The dialogue driven narrative is like no other I have come across on my reading adventures.
 
I've read all the titles you've listed except for Entertainment, J-Sun, and in addition:

Man of Earth (1958)
The Furious Future (1963)
The Iron Thorn (1967)
Blood and Burning (1978)

Went through a phase of devouring all I could find by him, and still rate both Michaelmas and Rogue Moon in particular very highly. I was delighted to reprint his story "All for Love" in last year's The Mammoth Book of SF Wars, which I co-edited with Ian Watson.

An often overlooked author.
 
AE35Unit said:
Well I saw Who? years ago and got curious about this odd cool sounding name.
So far Ive only read a couple of stories(Citadel and Stoker and the Stars) but I want more.
See here:
http://sfaddict.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/discovered-author-algis-budrys.html?m=0
Click to expand...

Mangara said:
I read Rogue Moon recently and it was fantastic. I think I gave it a 4/5 on goodreads. The dialogue driven narrative is like no other I have come across on my reading adventures.
Click to expand...

Cool - hope you both keep at it - it is kind of hard to top Rogue Moon but he comes near it a lot and, while I was bothered more by parts of Michaelmas than Ian was, parts of it do equal or exceed Rogue Moon even if the whole doesn't.

Ian Whates said:
I've read all the titles you've listed except for Entertainment, J-Sun, and in addition:

Man of Earth (1958)
The Furious Future (1963)
The Iron Thorn (1967)
Blood and Burning (1978)

Went through a phase of devouring all I could find by him, and still rate both Michaelmas and Rogue Moon in particular very highly. I was delighted to reprint his story "All for Love" in last year's The Mammoth Book of SF Wars, which I co-edited with Ian Watson.

An often overlooked author.
Click to expand...

Wow. That's about the whole deal - how would you describe Man of Earth and what did you think of it? I didn't even know that title existed for a long time.

Glad you're keeping him in print. I'd humbly suggest - in loose order - "The Burning World", "The Distant Sound of Engines", "The Executioner", or "The End of Summer" for your next anthology. :)

I think one of the reason's he's overlooked is (a) obviously he had long spells out of SF and doesn't have a large body of work but (b) he's not very flashy. He doesn't always grab you by the throat and yell but speaks quietly and intently and if you stop to listen, he's saying a lot. I'm usually one for the Big Idea and not interested in little details but his observations of mannerisms and mental attitudes and interpersonal relations make me interested in the details. Not that he doesn't also have Big Ideas but it doesn't entirely surprise me that he gets overlooked.
 
I used to have this in this very edition, but never got round to reading the stories within. Then I moved and had to lose all my books.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/b/algis-budrys/unexpected-dimension.htm


c2739-2_zps782de811.jpg
 
AE35Unit said:
I used to have this in this very edition, but never got round to reading the stories within. Then I moved and had to lose all my books.
Click to expand...

That sucks twice - it's never good to lose books and, worse, that's a really good collection. If I've seen you say, I apologize, but I don't recall - why did you have to lose them? Just a space issue or some catastrophe?
 
J-Sun said:
That sucks twice - it's never good to lose books and, worse, that's a really good collection. If I've seen you say, I apologize, but I don't recall - why did you have to lose them? Just a space issue or some catastrophe?
Click to expand...

Oh in 2000 I moved location, 200 miles north east and had no transport of my own so had to leave a lot of stuff behind.
 
OK, I got Budrys's The Unexpected Dimension on interlibrary loan and read "The Distant Sound of Engines." I'm afraid I don't get it. A hospitalized truck driver with perfect recall of what he hears other patients say is dying from (I gather) gangrenous stumps. The story is science fiction because one of the other patients had a terrible accident -- "'the field was distorted by the Sun .... the equation for coordinating spacetime is....'"
5152104324_5e93c366b7_z.jpg

I think it's just me, but something isn't clicking into place.
 
THE AMSIRS AND THE IRON THORN: Started out great then petered out.

WHO? Interesting enough to keep reading but I have a negative thing about is it or isn't it type stories. Is the house really haunted? Is he really a time traveller? Is that really a ghost? That kind of stuff. Sometimes it's okay, but sometimes...:mad:
 
Spoilers for "The Distant Sound of Engines", of course...


If you take it as a mainstream story, it's two dying dudes in hospital beds where one's crazy and the other is listening to him ramble. Even this could have a kind of pathos and is pretty much the world the narrator/driver is living (and dying) in. But as an SF story, the other guy is either a secret scientist, alien, time traveler, or parallel worlds traveler or whatever and is a guy with Special Knowledge who really knows about FTL and whatnot. And so I feel like I can read all kinds of stuff into this. One is the single simple truth that you want to pass on what you've gained and not have it be for nothing - to live on somehow in some small way and not die utterly - to benefit others before you go. Another aspect is how we can all be wrapped up in our problems and miss the Big Picture. Or, contrariwise, you may be some big FTL dude from some outer/alter space and I'm just a truck driver but before death we're all the same. And it touches on how civilization works, too - we learn things and pass them on and that's how it grows but some things we have to learn more than once. And, of course, it drives me nuts to think in a literal sense that here this guy has the secret to FTL but doesn't even know it and then it gets lost twice over. Really painful.

The title's also really good, to me - just the words are good but they relate to the trucker thinking about the engines he's hearing and his distant engines but the other guy may be thinking of really distant engines - things that power to and from other spaces and times.

And what with the waiting tables and trucking, it's a definitive Budrys story, too, in the sense that most Budrys stories are about doing things. Acquiring skills and knowledge.

I dunno - I don't think it's a crystal clear and obvious story and you can probably interpret it in a lot of ways but that's basically how I took it and some of the things it made me think of.
 
Thank you, J-Sun; I'll read "The Sound of Distant Engines" again, with your notes in mind.
 
I read Budrys's "Never Meet Again," a time travel story of irony and pathos, and one that should interest readers of Dick's Man in the High Castle or Robert Harris's Fatherland, given its alternate time-stream element in which the Nazis won World War II.

I wish I could hear him read it:

http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=647
 
I read "Go and Behold Them," originally published as "The End of Winter" under Budrys's William Scarff pseudonym. (The same issue of Venture featured a Budrys serial.) A short story about death, and a strange alien artifact -- different from the installation in "Rogue Moon," but one could well believe the same author was the imaginer -- and about men and women and love. I'd say it deserves to be better known. Like "Never Meet Again," this story is in The Unexpected Dimension. They were reprinted here, too:
http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/entertainment.html
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
logan_run Algis Budrys Classic SF&F 4
Vertigo Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys Reviews & Interviews 4
Anthony G Williams The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys Reviews & Interviews 3
Durandal RIP, Algis Budrys Obituaries 9

Similar threads


Back
Top