Photo: Dave Budrys
 

The Alien Novelist

By Mark Williams
MIT Technology Review, November/December 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Algis Budrys maintained an apprehensive watchfulness toward much of the human race. As the small son of Lithuania's consul general in Königsberg, East Prussia, he had seen Adolf Hitler pass in full Nazi pomp.

More than seven decades later, dying in a Chicago suburb, Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents' apartment on that spring day in 1936. He told me, "After the Hitlerjugend walked through, Hitler came by in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I'm sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn't have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise." The Königsberg crowds produced an indescribable sound, Budrys recalled, and some individuals behaved as though experiencing epileptic seizures — or ran for the bushes, unable to control their bowels. "Some of them made it, some didn't," he said. As he wrote later, on that day he realized he had come into consciousness among a species of werewolf.

This cultured man of Middle European origins, who was multilingual at five and went to university at 16, became a passionate advocate for the view that great and beautiful work had been published in American science fiction magazines. The fiction Budrys himself began writing as a young man in the 1950s still shows that SF can be literary art.

"He was in some ways the best writer of his kind around," Frederik Pohl told me after Budrys's death in June. "He made sentences come alive better than most writers. I'm not talking just about science fiction writers." Kingsley Amis once wrote, "Algis Budrys, if all goes well, may become the best science fiction writer since Wells."

That didn't quite happen. In the 1950s and early '60s Budrys published a hundred-odd stories and a half-dozen novels, which reflected his own experience not least in tending to feature deeply isolated people and problems of identity. One novel, Who? (1958), compares well with work by his mainstream contemporaries. Budrys capped the decade with another book, Rogue Moon (1960), considered one of the half-dozen SF masterpieces. Then he turned his energies to making money in publishing and advertising, but he kept a foot in the field. His last great novel, Michaelmas (1977), imagines a digitally networked world much like our own.

That Budrys wrote in English is a historical accident. In 1936, his father was assigned to New York, then in 1940 the USSR occupied Lithuania. The Budrys family ended up on a chicken farm in rural New Jersey.

"My big breakthrough came when Miss Anderson, who owned the general store in Dorothy, New Jersey, gave me a bunch of unsold magazines, including Astonishing Stories, edited by Frederik Pohl," Budrys said. Having taught himself English at six, Budrys had graduated to science fiction in his local library. From Astonishing, he moved on to other SF magazines.

In the 1940s, science fiction took root in pulp magazines in the United States, most significantly in Astounding Science Fiction. "Astounding was the last magazine I picked up," Budrys told me. "It didn't look like an SF magazine." Astounding's editor, John W. Campbell, had assembled a stable of writers such as Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. The magazine was a revelation to the 11-year-old boy.

At 21, Budrys sold his first story to Campbell's Astounding. "I didn't have any agenda for SF. I just wanted to write it. I thought I was a hotshot." Whom had he thought the best writers? "Me," Budrys answered emphatically. To the charge against science fiction that it scants characterization, he said an artful SF writer can create fully realized characters.

Who? is set in the late 1980s. Its hero is a scientist named Martino who has been injured in an explosion while developing a strategically vital technology at his lab in Europe. The Soviets rebuild him with cybernetic prosthetics for his face and skull and one arm and return him to the West. Budrys imported material from his own life into this novel: Azarin, the Soviet spy chief, is modeled on his father, a former military intelligence officer, and the sections describing Martino's youth draw on Budrys' own early experiences.

Rogue Moon takes place in an alternate 1959 where a secret project sponsored by the U.S. government has reached the far side of the moon and found a large, nonnatural structure that kills everybody who enters it. The project of understanding this artifact has fallen to a scientist, Hawks, who has developed a teleporter. A human subject scanned by Hawks's machine on Earth is destroyed, and the resulting information is used to create one duplicate in the machine and another in a "receiver" on the moon. Before these duplicates' experiences diverge, they briefly share a consciousness.

Budrys' text conveys only what the characters can see and what they say, without describing their interior mental states. Hawks plans to map the lunar artifact by sending duplicates into it. When they die, their cognates on Earth will retain memories of what happened in the preceding moments. But enduring death by proxy has left each surviving duplicate catatonic. Hawks finds an abnormal individual, Barker, for the job. Barker remains functional as his duplicates repeatedly enter the lunar "formation," advance a few meters, and die. The artifact isn't really the point. The novel focuses on its characters, who are all psychopaths.

Hawks is capable of softer emotions. The scientist meets a young woman, with whom he opens up. As a Barker duplicate undertakes the final trip that will reach the artifact's far side, a Hawks duplicate joins him. They emerge alive, but Hawks tells Barker that there's no life for them on Earth — that belongs to their duplicates — and walks off to die alone on the moon's surface. In the book's final lines, the Hawks on Earth finds a note in his hand: "Remember me to her."

Michaelmas is named after its hero, who is ostensibly a wealthy news anchorman, But 20 years earlier, he was a hacker who wrote a program, Domino, that's since grown into a sentient artificial intelligence distributed throughout the planet's digital networks. Domino empowers Michaelmas to be the world's hidden manager.

The theme of identity recurs and Michaelmas meets a replica of himself. This novel is the most polished example of Budrys's craft. The language is highly literary and the narrative voice swoops imperceptibly from third person past to first person present. Wonderful characters are painted in quick, deft strokes, and the plot gallops across a single, eventful day and three continents. Michaelmas is a great man who remains benevolent and uncorrupted, but he has no affectionate relationships except with his creation, Domino. Our universe turns out to be a fluke of information theory, tuned into existence by beings who may be only drifters elsewhere in the multiverse.

Michaelmas depicts a future that's now an alternative version of our past. In many ways, it's a more attractive world. In a similar way, Budrys' science fiction presents possibilities that were never quite realized. The bulk of his writing was published a half-century ago and isn't in print, though it's easy enough to find online.
 

AR  I don't think I read these books in my sci-fi period forty years ago. Maybe I should do so now.