Algis Budrys

Algirdas Jonas "Algis" Budrys (January 9, 1931 – June 9, 2008) was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor and critic. He was also known under the pen names Frank Mason, Alger Rome in collaboration with Jerome Bixby, John A. Sentry, William Scarff and Paul Janvier. In the 1990s he was the publisher and editor of the science fiction magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction.

Biography

Early life and education

Budrys was born in Königsberg, Germany (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia). His father Jonas Budrys was the consul general of Lithuania. In 1936, when Budrys was five years old, Jonas was appointed as the consul general in New York City.

After the Soviet Union's occupation of Lithuania in 1940, Budrys helped his family run a chicken farm in New Jersey while his father was part of the exiled Lithuanian Diplomatic Service, since the United States continued to recognize the pre-World War II Lithuanian diplomats.

Budrys was educated at the University of Miami and later at Columbia University in New York City.

Career

Incorporating his family's experience, Budrys's fiction depicts isolated and damaged people and themes of identity, survival and legacy. He taught himself English at the age of six by reading Robinson Crusoe. From Flash Gordon comic strips, Budrys read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine; Astounding Science Fiction caused him at the age of 11 to want to become a science fiction writer. His first published science fiction story was "The High Purpose", which appeared in Astounding in 1952.

In 1952, Budrys worked as editor and manager for such science fiction publishers as Gnome Press and Galaxy Science Fiction. Some of Budrys's science fiction in the 1950s was published under the pen name "John A. Sentry", a reconfigured Anglification of his Lithuanian name. Among his other pseudonyms in the SF magazines of the 1950s and elsewhere, several revived as bylines for vignettes in his magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, is "William Scarff". Budrys also wrote several stories under the names "Ivan Janvier" or "Paul Janvier", and used "Alger Rome" in his collaborations with Jerome Bixby.

Budrys's 1960 novella Rogue Moon was nominated for a Hugo Award and was later anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (1973). His Cold War science fiction novel Who? was adapted for the screen in 1973. In addition to numerous Hugo Award and Nebula Award nominations, Budrys won the Science Fiction Research Association's 2007 Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to speculative fiction scholarship. In 2009, he was the posthumous recipient of one of the first three Solstice Awards presented by the SFWA in recognition of his contributions to the field of science fiction.

Having published about 100 stories and a half-dozen novels, with a wife and children to support, after 1960 Budrys wrote less fiction and worked in publishing, editing and advertising. He became better known as among science fiction's best critics than as writer, reviewing for Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a book editor for Playboy, a longtime teacher at the Clarion Writers Workshop and an organizer and judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest.

Budrys also worked as a publicist; in a famous publicity stunt, he erected a giant pickle on the proposed site of the Chicago Picasso during the time the newly arriving sculpture was embroiled in controversy.

Death

Algis Budrys last resided in Evanston, Illinois, where he died from metastatic melanoma on June 9, 2008, at age 77. He was buried at Maryhill Catholic Cemetery in Niles.