To repeat myself: Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was a noted science fiction author—his Rogue Moon in particular is an acclaimed classic—who also wrote much memorable and witty criticism of the field. His 1985 volume Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, assembling the review columns he published in Galaxy magazine from 1965 to 1971, is one of the few single-author books about SF to be as highly regarded as the pioneer works In Search of Wonder (1956; expanded 1967, 1996) by Damon Knight, New Maps of Hell (1960) by Kingsley Amis, and The Issue at Hand (1964) and More Issues at Hand (1970) by James Blish.
The above introductory paragraph was written in 2012 for Benchmarks Continued—see below—and remains as true as ever. That was the year in which, after a long period of apathy, my small press Ansible Editions returned to life in collaboration with Greg Pickersgill to publish the complete run of Algis Budrys’s SF book review columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in three volumes. These, taking their cue from the earlier collection of Galaxy columns Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf (1985), were and indeed still are Benchmarks Continued (2012), Benchmarks Revisited (2013) and Benchmarks Concluded (2013), between them running to over 467,000 words and containing more wit, wisdom, and footnotes1* than the mere human mind can readily comprehend.
Even before the Benchmarks project was complete, there were suggestions from several interested parties that we should and must go on to collect this major SF critic’s full-length essays. But it seemed like an awful lot of work. Some pieces such as “Paradise Charted,” his lengthy 1984 history of the SF genre, were locked up in the hard-to-find and ridiculously overpriced—by rapacious online dealers rather than its original publisher—collection Outposts: Literatures of Milieux (Borgo Press, dated 1996, released 1997). Time slipped by.
Now at last, with a great deal of help from friends and colleagues who are listed in the Acknowledgements, here is that collection of The Rest of Budrys. Or at least a very generous helping of the rest, presented in chronological order. On the same principle as the Benchmarks collections, the title Beyond the Outposts was chosen to echo Outposts while also, I hope, indicating that this book contains a great deal more than that former slim collection.
The overall focus of Beyond the Outposts is on substantial essays about speculative fiction and its creation, passing over the many general interest, motoring magazine, and (now sadly dated) popular science articles published during a long writing career. Even within the SF-oriented work, I have steeled myself to omit short letters, brief recommendations, multibook newspaper reviews where space allowed little to be said about any given title (but see “Short Takes 1979–1981” for some tasty excerpts), interviews (the exception here being the extract “Reviewing Heinlein”), half-page editorials for Tomorrow Speculative Fiction (“Well, one piece of news this issue is that the price is going up again, because the price of paper has gone up again. I hate it...”), and in later years the repeated plugs for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest which, however dear at the time to Budrys’s heart, did not really engage his special talent for sharp analysis of genre fiction.
Probably the most significant omission from this collection is the how-to-write column series that appeared in Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in 1993–1994 and was separately collected as Writing to the Point: A Complete Guide to Selling Fiction (1994)—a volume reprinted several times, most recently in 2015. These columns, perhaps because aimed at relative beginners, seem less acute and insightful than the 1977–1979 “On Writing” columns written for Locus magazine and included here. Also omitted are a number of late 1980s and early 1990s genre reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, which, it turned out, had appeared virtually unaltered in F&SF “Books” columns already brought together in Benchmarks Concluded.
As a change from our man’s traditional focus on the written word, this book also contains a few witty film reviews: “Scanners Writhe in Pain”, “The Empire Talks Back,” and “The Revenge of the Empire.” No prizes are offered for deducing from those titles which movies are covered. Meanwhile, connoisseurs of the Budrysian footnote in all its native exuberance will particularly appreciate “Non-Literary Influences on Science Fiction” and “Paradise Charted.” Both of these long pieces and other included essays such as “Pulp!” bear out the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s statement that “His sf criticism ... is almost unfailingly perceptive and promulgates with a convert’s grim élan a view of the essential nature of the genre that ferociously privileged the US magazine tradition.” (As Budrys wrote about an earlier and also British encyclopedia of SF: “A persistent over-readiness to vilify the pulps marks British SF thinking and thus loses breadth of concept.”—Chicago Sun-Times, January 1979.)
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction normally prints “sf” in lower case as above [as does NYRSF—the eds.]. Budrys, often indicating that he preferred the abbreviation to stand for speculative fiction rather than science fiction, used “SF” four times as often as “sf” in the essays collected here; so the upper-case version has been adopted throughout. More than once in this collection he states his dislike of “sci-fi,” which newspapers all too often substitute for “SF”; the latter has been restored where it seems most likely to have been his original choice (repeatedly, for example, in “SF in the 1970s” in the “Short Takes” section). One aberration is his frequent use of the ugly and never widely adopted fannish alternative “stef” in “Paradise Charted,” written for the university-affiliated TriQuarterly: this looks suspiciously like a tongue-in-cheek exercise in baiting the academics.
Finally, another point from that 2012 introduction that bears repeating is that Algis Budrys received the 2007 Pilgrim Award for life achievement in SF and fantasy scholarship. This is not lightly given. Nor is the SF Writers of America Solstice Award, a further career honor which was inaugurated with its posthumous presentation to Budrys in 2009.
David Langford lives in Reading, Berks.
1* With unusual restraint, the July 1989 installment had just one: “I have chosen not to put footnotes in this column.”
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