lthough Algis Budrys has written only a handful of books in his 50-year career, he is considered by many scholars to be an important and vital voice in science fiction. His 1959 novel The Falling Torch sold more than 250,000 copies and remained in print for over a decade (it was subsequently re-issued in 1991 with restored text as Falling Torch), while his classic adventure Rogue Moon (1960) has been designated by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the most influential stories in SF literary history.
Budrys has served as a critic for both Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has been the coordinating judge for L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest for most of that competition's 18-year existence. (In that role, he will once again participate in the next Hubbard Achievement Awards ceremony on August 10 of this year.) In the following conversation, Budrys reveals why he believes it's important for established SF novelists not only to think and write about tomorrow, but also to guide those up-and-coming authors who will ultimately define science fiction in the future.
You were born in East Prussia in 1931 to Lithuanian parents, and your family moved to the United States when you were only five years old. How did this uprooting affect your outlook on life and your writing?
Budrys: I didn't really think of it as an uprooting experience, because I had been traveling all my life, getting on trains and whatnot, going God knows where with my mother. So when we finally decided to come to America, that was just another trip. But it was a fascinating trip! First we took a boat across the Baltic Sea, then we landed in Sweden. We took a train across Sweden, wound up in Norway and there we climbed on board our ship.
The ship took off for New York, and ran into a hell of a storm! A terrible storm ... at least it seemed so to me. And everybody was crippled: Everybody was in their bunks puking up their guts! Except me--I was fine! So I got the whole ship to wander through. The only people who had control of their functions were I and the crew. It was really fun! Then we landed in New York City, and that was fun, too. We went to 46th and 5th Avenue, which was where the Lithuanian Consulate General was. And every bit of it struck me as just plain fascinating.
My life had been full of things already, so it wasn't until I got to first grade [that problems arose]. There people started calling me a German boy, which really upset me, because I wasn't: I was Lithuanian. The fact that I was born in Germany was irrelevant because we had diplomatic passports and we were citizens of our native country. But nobody would listen. Nobody would care. People were calling me a German boy, and that's bad because, for one thing, I wasn't, and for another thing, we were in a Jewish community, which did not make life very good for us. Mom and Pop didn't care, because they were in the consulate, but I was out roaming around, so to speak. And it was there that I began to feel this sense of alienation; of being unjustly pushed around. Actually, I've never gotten over that feeling.
So how does that impact your writing?
Budrys: Well, it must have impacted my writing, because generally speaking I write about alienated people doing things that they feel are perfectly ordinary but which the general public feels are not in keeping with what the general public feels. So that's the way it is. I write very well, but I write peculiar things.
Did these incidents then, at least in part, plant the seeds for your writing career?
Budrys: My career as a professional, yes. I had 12 years of learning how to write before that. I was very young when I started--I really started when I was nine. I wrote my first story then, and I was constantly working on stories. When I was about 17 or 18, I began to write stuff that I thought was good enough, or good enough to make it. And it wasn't, or rather, it bounced. But I hung onto it, and when I was 21, Fred Pohl took one of those old stories and sold it to Astounding, which made me laugh, because it was the very same manuscript that Astounding had bounced when I was 17. The difference was that now Astounding was no longer king of the hill. There was Galaxy, there was The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Things were tighter for Astounding, and my story apparently just crossed the borderline. Which was how I would characterize it ... it was a terrible story!
What was the name of it?
Budrys: It's called "The High Purpose," and it's about the crew of the first moon rocket sitting around and bitching because the aliens had landed and therefore moon rockets were obsolete before they ever took off. But they went anyway, and then that was the story.
Do you remember at that time what you thought the world would be like at the turn of the century?
Budrys: Yeah, but I don't think I ever devoted serious thought to that. I realized that cars would be like airplanes, and that cities would have taller buildings, and that highways would swarm with helicopters and whatnot. But I didn't care. I wrote stories which mainly were a few years in the future, and I was concerned with what people did, not what the cities were like. That's true of most of my books. I think that for me, science fiction is just plain another literature. It has essentially the same rules, even though there are lots of science fiction stories that don't follow them, but for me it's more important to write about the people, and let the rest of it just happen.
You've said in past interviews that "science fiction isn't really science fiction. It's technology fiction." Could you elaborate on that?
Budrys: Well, science fiction would be the kind of thing that Hal Clement writes, in which the science is central. Most science fiction--the overwhelming majority of it--is concerned with improvements in technology. People have better television sets, etc. It doesn't have anything really
to do with science.
In addition to your writing, you're also a teacher, particularly through your work with L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest. Why is the education of new SF talent so important to you?
Budrys: It used to be that, in the good old days, editors would teach writers how to do better. They would pick up stuff from the writer's stories and say to them, "Look, you could have done it this way." Those editors are gone. In fact, I'm not sure there are editors anymore. There are people
who sit in editorial chairs, but that may be different. So somebody has got to teach the kids how to do things. I happened upon Writers of the Future and saw a golden opportunity. We've got something like over 200 writers in science fiction now who don't necessarily owe their nature to Writers of the Future, but who got their start with Writers of the Future. They got a chance to speak somewhat more quickly than they would have if they'd depended upon trial and error, and they have a better place to make themselves known.
I'm very proud of that, and the fact that a number of them have written many novels, and many of the novels are good novels. I just feel that somebody ought to be doing this! I also taught for 11 straight years at Clarion, which couldn't be done: It was against the rules, but I did it anyway. Generally speaking, the management at Clarion--mainly Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm--would let a guy teach for a couple of years, and then not come back for a while. Well, I just kept going. And that was important because I actually got to meet the people who were trying to be writers. In fact, many of them are still in contact with me. So when I went from that, teaching maybe 20 people a year for one week, to Writers of the Future, the whole darned world blossomed on me. I worked with a lot of youngsters (and some occasionally not so young), and I wouldn't trade it for the world!
Over the years you've also devoted a great deal of energy to science-fiction criticism. What role does that play in developing or furthering SF literature?
Budrys: I would think that it helps to improve the breed. The way I do criticism is, I take a book and pull it apart if it pulls, and point out what could have been done better: Point to errors, give praise where it seems deserved and just keep that up. I didn't know I was going to be a critic;
it certainly wasn't one of my ambitions. It just happened, and I frankly didn't care whether anybody liked the way I did it or not. But I do feel that I am part of a tradition with Damon Knight and Jim Blish of being a more knowledgeable critic than most, because I have done a lot of writing, which most critics haven't. I knew more about the inside of being a writer than most critics did, and it came very easily to me for that reason. I never did a second draft. I just batted it out as fast as possible, and there it was.
And how was that different than writing a book?
Budrys: Well, that's essentially the way I write books too, though not as fast.
Every few years it seems that someone proclaims that SF is dead or dying. Yet, as a judge in the Writers of the Future competition, you seem to find exciting new authors on a regular basis. How would you characterize the current state of SF?
Budrys: Science fiction seems to be the same as it ever was. I think there's a certain amount of honor and glory in proclaiming the death of science fiction, but it's nonsense. Science fiction, despite the fact that it is handled as a genre, is not a genre. It is a complete, total literature. The oldest literature, by the way!
It wasn't until a couple of hundred years ago that somebody thought of writing about real things that happened right then; what you might call descriptive fiction. And science fiction will go
on forever, though it possibly will have different names. See, a Western can be presumably wiped out by having fashions change. Same with crime stories and whatnot. But science fiction is not like that. It does not yield to temporary constraints. So I tend to think that the people who proclaim the death of science fiction every once in a while are wrong.
We've talked a bit about Writers of the Future, but there's another prestigious competition--Illustrators of the Future--affiliated with that contest. From your viewpoint as an author, to what degree is illustration important to science fiction?
Budrys: I don't know, but I really, really liked the pictures that Edd Cartier put down next to the stories. I really, really like Kelly Freas' and Michael Whelan's work, along with a couple of other people. I'm not sure the two things can be completely separated. I disapprove of fantasy and
science fiction for not containing illustrations: It gives the book a sort of dry tone. Incidentally, for a while The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction did have illustrations, but the experiment didn't work. There's a magic in having a picture of a guy raising a sword, or a picture of a guy taking a long walk down an airport runway. There's a feeling that the story has been fully realized by good illustrators. So I don't think that science fiction and science fiction illustration can be fully separated.
In 1997, you were one of the pioneers in bringing literary SF to the Internet when you converted your magazine Tomorrow from a print periodical to an online publication. What prompted that move, and why didn't it ultimately work out?
Budrys: If I knew why it didn't work out, I'd probably fix it! We'd lost a fortune doing the publication in hard copy. We did 24 issues, and to this day they remain pretty good issues. But I realized that I couldn't possibly keep it up, so I went on the Internet with it, which enabled me
to expand the magazine. It enabled me to carry more features and things like that, but it still wasn't taking off. Money got tighter and tighter, and it finally got to the point where I couldn't buy any new stories. I kept that up for a while, and finally one day I realized that I was not only pouring my money down a rat hole, but I was pouring my intentions into the same rat hole and I couldn't do that anymore. Why the magazine didn't work, I don't know. I suspect it's because I can't do promotion worth a damn. But I could be wrong: I mean, nobody else has made any money at it either.
What future does the Internet hold for SF?
Budrys: If they ever figure out how to make money at it, that'll be the medium. Print magazines are falling by the wayside, and the Internet somehow does it. The way the Internet does it now is mostly by publishing what amount to glorified fanzines. There are hundreds of these things
around, and some of them publish some pretty good science fiction. But most of them don't, and they work on the cheap: They don't pay the writers, or they don't pay them very much. So it's a different ball game. I tried to publish a fully professional prozine, first in hard copy and then on the Internet, and it didn't work. I had subscribers, but not enough of them.
What does the future hold for Algis Budrys?
Budrys: I'll probably be found draped over my computer keyboard at some point. I'm 70 years old. I don't know how much longer I can go, but I plan to keep going until I stop. I don't have anything else I'd rather do, and since there's no retirement income here (although I've been drawing Social Security for some time), I'll just keep going.
Looking back on your career, what do you believe has been your biggest contribution to SF literature?
Budrys: The teaching. I write, as I said, very well, and I admire myself no end. But I don't write much; I've only written something like 10 books in my life. They're good books, and there are still people who come up to me and say, "Gee, that was a good book." But I don't think that's
anywhere near as enduring as the teaching. I've got, or I think I've got, probably a thousand people who have learned from me. And that's really something!
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