The Way the Future Blogs

Algis Budrys

Algis Budrys became my client within a matter of just months before, crippled by money troubles, I closed my literary agency’s door forever. I hadn’t really had enough time to position him in the kind of publications he deserved, but I had made a pretty good start. I had sold almost all of his backlog of science-fiction short stories and novelettes. I got him contracts for paperbound novels — not the genteel old-line kind of publishing house I had envisioned for him, but at least a step in a better direction. And then I turned him loose.

By then A J had begun to have a certain reputation. He negotiated a few contracts on his own, he got a film offer for one of them and successfully saw it through all the log-jams that lie between an expression of interest and an actual movie that people buy tickets to and then watch in a real motion-picture theater. It wasn’t big money, but it was a sign of success denied to almost all of his colleagues.

He didn’t abandon science fiction, because one of his best friends — me, that is — having jettisoned his literary agency, had become the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines. And, for the next couple of years almost every issue of my magazines had at least one Budrys story in it.

I should describe A J’s work habits, because they were a bit unusual. Every evening, after supper and perhaps an hour or so of television, AJ would fill a thermos with hot coffee, check his tape recorder to make sure the batteries were healthy and there was plenty of tape, kiss his wife, Edna, good night and then get into his car and drive away. Drive where? That didn’t matter because he wasn’t sightseeing. What he was doing, Scheherazade-like, was dictating a new story each night, though instead of into the impatient ears of a threatening sultan it went no farther than a spool of magnetic tape — at least, not until AJ got home sometime in that early morning, dumped the filled tape spools next to Edna’s typewriter and went cheerfully off to sleep. Edna was an excellent typist, so by the time A J shambled into the kitchen for breakfast around early afternoon, the manuscript was ready to be shown to an editor.

You must understand that by the words “an editor,” what I mean is me. The Budrys house in Monmouth County. New Jersey, was no more than a twenty-minute drive from mine, and on “story days,” the ones on which typing had produced a salable manuscript, A J, having phoned to make sure I was going into the office the next day, would bring in the story and sit in my third-floor office while I read it.

Truthfully, the act of reading A J’s stories was little more than a formality. I never rejected one. I had no reason to do so; AJ was hot. And the next morning I would pop the manuscript into my briefcase, along with anything else I wanted to buy and their purchase orders, take the Jersey Central train to New York and my little fraction of the offices of Bob Guinn, the man who owned Galaxy.

I had long ago convinced Bob that writers weren’t like printing-supply vendors. Each one had his own peculiar ways, and A J’s weird trait was punctuality. That is, he would give me first look at everything he wrote as long as he could get the check to pay for it the next day. So that’s what he got, By the time I got home for dinner AJ would be sitting in Carol’s kitchen, with a cup of her coffee in his hand, the other hand poised to accept the check.

It was, for both of us, a pretty smooth-running machine, most of the time.

 
(More to come.)

 
Related posts:

• A J
• A J, Part 2
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me

TAD says he’s tired of getting up-to-date scientific and political news from this blog, and can I recommend other sources?

I can tell you what I read every week, which is five weekly publications: Science, New Scientist, The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times and Newsweek.

Science is mostly pretty technical. New Scientist is an English magazine and fairly expensive in the U.S., but you can read much of it online, and maybe some nearby public or college library gets it and will let you read it. (If not, get on the one most likely to listen to you and tell them they should.) If I could subscribe to just one magazine, this would be it.

The New Yorker may sound like a lightweight choice but its articles in depth can’t be beat, and often they are on scientific subjects. (They also have great cartoons and much else.)

I also read about a dozen other periodicals and miscellaneous other stuff, but far the most of what I know and keep replenishing is from these five.

That headline, of course, is meant to be sarcastic. You see, we do have a problem. Our Ma Dell upright created it, all by itself, and all of the wizardry of our ordinarily undefeatable Guru, Dick Smith, has been unable to it restore it to civilized behavior. So please tell me (and Dick). Have you ever had this particular trouble with a computer? If so, what did you do about it?

First it goes on nicely writing down my well-chosen words. Then, when I switch to another file, it flashes a blood-red sign in my face that starts with the threats, saying something like, “You get out of this file or we’ll make you wish you had! This file is reserved for Frederik Pohl to work on, so you leave it at once. Exit this file now!”

Nothing as deranged as this has ever turned up on any of the four other computers in the house. Just on the one that I write blog material on, so tell me, please. Has anybody got any help for a seriously demented computer?

 

When I was writing The Last Theorem with Sir Arthur Clarke, I found it necessary in the story, for plot purposes, to have the hero, Ranjit Subramanian, spend a prolonged period in a jail, in solitary confinement.

The obvious way to get that to happen was to have Ranjit get tangled up in the Sri Lankan civil war between the governing Sinhalese, who had been in the habit of keeping all the positions of power for themselves, and the rebellious Tamil Tigers, who wanted to share in the governance. (Both Sinhalese and Tamils were uninvited immigrants from India. The Sinhalese, however, had arrived earlier.)

The war was ongoing and bloody,and it dovetailed nicely with my general plans for the novel, so I happily wrote some ten or twenty thousand words embodying that material. I got quite a few pages further along in the story, sending twenty- or thirty-page chunks on to Arthur as I finished them for his comments, suggestions and approval.

By then Arthur was beginning to be ill. He still read everything and gave me feedback, but it took him longer. I was running fifty to seventy-five pages ahead of his reading, but I didn’t worry; since I knew that what I was writing was pretty good stuff.

It was, however, the wrong pretty good stuff.

Arthur’s next letter was longer than usual and much more alarmed. Had I forgotten (he asked) that he was a guest in the country of Sri Lanka, and his permanent-residency permission could be revoked at any moment when the government came to think of him as an embarrassment?

Well, actually I had forgotten, and not because I hadn’t been told. As far back as the 1950s when we were touring Japan together — maybe even earlier — Arthur had let me see how precarious he thought his residency was. There was never a suggestion that the Sri Lankan government had made any threats or issued any warnings. If anything like that had ever happened, Arthur didn’t mention it to me. As far as I could see, the problem was that Arthur loved Sri Lanka, had made it his permanent homeland and was worriedly aware that a couple of bureaucrats in Colombo could kick him out of the land he loved at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all.

If I didn’t give that the importance Arthur did — if I let myself forget about it in writing that draft of the novel — it wasn’t that I had truly forgotten. It was simply that I couldn’t believe that the Sri Lankan government would ever consider antagonizing the man who, through his books, was the finest press agent and ambassador that any struggling Third World country could ever imagine having.

On the other hand, I could readily believe that governments as a class are all too likely to shoot themselves in the foot, doing stupid, self-harming things. Arguing from principles of reason and common sense didn’t pay when you were talking about governments. And anyway it was Arthur whose ox would be gored, and thus his decision to make, not mine.

So, not without a few tears, I threw away some twenty thousand words of perfectly good copy about the Sri Lankan civil war and replaced it with (as I now believe) some actually rather better words about 21st-century high-seas piracy and the American custom (especially during the disastrous reign of America’s worst president, ever, George W. Bush) of farming people you wanted to make disappear into the penal systems of democracy-challenged countries.

That’s how collaboration works, my children. You get to have the literary skills and talents of your collaborator working for you, which is a useful thing. But sometimes you get unexpectedly ambushed by his (or her) hang-ups as well. That can be a serious pain in places where you don’t want a pain. But sometimes it can all work out for the best.

 
If you’ve read a lot of my work you know that I do sometimes try to keep up with the latest Big Thinks in cosmology — starting, as a matter of policy, writing about the steady-state universe with Jack Williamson way back when. That novel was The Reefs of Space, and Jack used the idea to create parts of the Everything where new matter and new space were being created before your very eyes. Great stuff, I can say with little vanity, because those settings were almost all Jack’s.

But that was then. This is now, and I have to say I have met my match. It is called M Theory and cosmologists say that for the first time they have a Theory of Everything which explains much of what Everything is all about. What’s more, it does this without producing useless infinities as the answers to all the equations that might produce testable predictions.

But as to using M Theory to provide the background science for a science-fiction novel, oh, spare me. One of the predictions that M Theory makes is that there isn’t just one universe, even not just a million universes, but 10 to the 500th power universes, and,. guys, I just can’t count that high. My newest novel, All the Lives He Led, which (hint) is just out, doesn’t move one skillionth of a millimeter off the surface of the Earth, and the one I’ve barely begun (about 75 pages of rough draft so far, completion date God knows when), hasn’t yet told me if any of it will get Off Earth at all.

So, sorry, Stephen Hawking. I admire you intensely and treasure the one time I heard you lecture, back at Fermilab years ago, but you’ve gone way too far for me to follow right now. But do send me a postcard when you get there.