Three more stories by Algis Budrys from The Unexpected Dimension

The 1960 collection The Unexpected Dimension contains seven stories by Algis Budrys.  We read three in our last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log, and a fourth, "First to Serve," last year when we read a bunch of robot stories by important SF writers.  So today let's finish up the collection by reading the three remaining tales.

"The Burning World" (1957)

This one has a title that sounds like it belongs on a J. G. Ballard novel, but it feels like it's aimed at the kind of techno-optimist libertarian who listens to Kmele Foster and Katherine Mangu-Ward podcasts while he's folding the laundry and washing the dishes (I know a guy like that!) because it depicts a post-scarcity anarchist society!

Some decades ago the merciless totalitarian regime headed by a cult-of-personality dictator named Bausch that ruled an unspecified mountainous region of Europe was overthrown when a rebel scientist discovered a simple means of tapping energy from some other dimension.  This new source of energy not only armed revolutionaries with powerful ray guns but made armies and taxmen and police obsolete by enabling everyone to easily provide food and electricity for himself and his family.

Josef Kimmensen was a leader of the movement that overthrew the old regime.  After winning the succession war that followed the revolution, he became president of the new small-government polity, known as the League.  Now he is an old sick man, practically at death's door.  Who will take his position as head of the last lingering vestiges of government and defend this free society based on individual responsibility and voluntary exchange?  And what will happen to his irresponsible twenty-something daughter, Susanne?  Kimmensen sees the solution to both problems in Jem Bendix, his young protege.  Kimmensen can die in peace if he knows Bendix is married to his daughter and firmly ensconced as head of the bare bones League administration.  But poor Kimmensen, in his rapidly fading twilight years, has to face some bad news: not only is some young jackass named Anse Messerschmidt talking up the need for a stronger government with a military force that can confront some alleged threat from the northwest, but said jackass is dating Susanne!

Budrys melds here the sort of ideas about individualism and freedom you see in some of the work of A. E. van Vogt (I'm thinking of "The Weapon Shop") and Robert Heinlein (I'm thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Rolling Stones and Beyond This Horizon) with a human story about a guy who is disappointed in his child specifically and the younger generation in general.  We get a brief history of Kimmensen's libertarian League and description of how it operates, interspersed with the plot, which follows the dying Kimmensen's plan to defuse pro-government activist Messerschmidt's plays for Susanne and for power--Kimmensen calls an election and Jem Bendix runs for president against Messerschmidt.  But Messerschmidt turns out to be a talented orator and a smooth political operator who has the ear of the young people who were born too late to remember the horrors of big government.  How far will Kimmensen and Bendix go, what kind of moral compromises will they make, to preserve the League?  When push comes to shove, how different really are Bausch, Kimmensen and Messerschmidt, all of them men with a vision for society and the determination and intelligence to pursue it?  To what extent do such men drive history and society, and to what extent are they the product of historical and social forces?

A somewhat sad and cynical piece, not bad.  "The Burning World" first appeared in Infinity Science Fiction, marketed as an "Exciting Long Novelet."  It was translated into French and appeared along with a 1957 story by Walter M. Miller Jr. in the 1984 volume Etoile Double #10.

"Go and Behold Them" (1958)

This story first appeared with the title "The End of Winter" in Venture Science Fiction under a pseudonym, maybe because Budrys's The Falling Torch was appearing as the serial in that same issue.  It would reappear in the 1990s periodical Pirate Writings, what isfdb calls a "quarterly semi-prozine."

It is a future of FTL drives and deep space exploration.  Our narrator, Harry Becker, works for "the Institute," a body that sends out two person-teams of scientists in small space ships to collect data on sectors of space measured in the hundreds of cubic light years.  Most of these two-member teams consist of married couples, and the narrator describes one such couple, a particularly skilled and likable pair, Lew and Norah Harvey.  The Harveys' ship crashed and our narrator is a member of the team that finds the wreck on an odd alien artifact, a metal sphere a thousand miles in diameter that is hurtling through space and is covered in sinister, disturbing rust-colored shapes.

This is an emotional story.  Becker is one of the members of the Institute who is not in a couple; he was in love with Norah, and finding her dead is a painful blow.  Norah's last recordings indicate more clearly what was only dimly hinted at before, that she loved Lew, but that there was some kind of trouble between them.  Apparently their marriage was sexless; I guess Norah was sterile and/or frigid (are we supposed to say "frigid" anymore?) or something like that.

"I loved you Lew," she said, quietly and serenely.  "Even though you never believed me.  Even though sometimes you hated me.  I loved you.  If I could never prove it to you in that one narrow way, still I loved you."

Lew died before Norah, and she buried her husband under a cairn of metal pieces.  Harvey buries Norah in turn, and the hideous, threatening metal forms on the surface of the artificial planet change, become less unsettling, even beautiful.  The narrator surmises that the alien sphere was a machine built to generate and support life, a machine that had failed aeons in the past, but which reactivated itself after receiving new insights about life from Lew's dead body.  As Lew was bitter, the shapes of the mechanism's attempts at creating life were ugly and scary, but the subsequent burial of the kind and generous Norah has given the machine the knowledge it needed to create forms of beauty.  The narrator surmises that if humans ever encounter the artifact again they will meet creatures who are, essentially, Norah and Lew's children, I suppose the children they couldn't have while alive because of Norah's unfortunate condition.

Good; the descriptions of the strange alien machine are vivid and evocative, and all the human stuff about frustrating sexual relationships and other emotionally charged experiences (for example, the narrator believes the beings who created the sphere, and perhaps those beings the sphere will finally engender, will be so advanced as to present an existential threat to the human race) is also effective.   

"The Executioner" (1956)

"The Executioner" first appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, and would be selected by famous British men-of-letters Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest for their 1961 SF anthology Spectrum and by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini for their anthology of SF crime stories, Dark Sins, Dark Dreams.  With all these important editors behind it, it must be good!

The place: New York State, now an independent country!  The time: A bizarre aristocratic future in which powerful families, their superior genetic material protected by eugenics laws that control who can produce children with whom, dominate society and politics.  This rigid control of the gene pool and the direction of society was deemed necessary centuries ago in order to prevent another cataclysm like that one back in the 21st century!

Some human beings were better equipped than others to judge what was best for the human race as a whole, but, with unrestricted marriage, these superior qualities were in grave danger of dilution.

This utilitarian reason for this polity's illiberal and inegalitarian structure is cloaked in the fiction that it was set up by a messiah/god figure, the Messire, who continues to watch over and direct every human action. 

Justice in this classbound society is meted out by men in tights, wigs, and lace, men who act as judge, jury and executioner!  Executions have an element of trial by combat to them, though the odds are strongly stacked in the judge's favor.  We observe as Chief Justice Samson Ezra Joyce presides over the trial of Clarissa Jones (are these names references to modernists Ezra Pound and James Joyce and 18th-century novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding?), a plebeian who is accused of addressing a member of a family (her lover!) by first name in public.  Joyce appears to be one of the few aristocrats to actually believe in all this Messire business; everything that happens, he feels, is a reflection of the Messire's will--Joyce thinks he is just doing the Messire's work and that his decisions in court, and the outcomes of his executions, are an expression of the judgement of the Messire, not a product of his own will and ability.

When something goes wrong at the trial of Jones, a stricken Joyce interprets it is a message from the Messire indicating that he, Joyce, should resign his post.  As a rebellion against the New York social order erupts and Joyce's less pious colleagues abandon all pretense in their scramble to quell the uprising, we readers see beyond the veil and recognize the cynical scam that is New York government and religion, but Joyce is driven to a final desperate act of faith in the Messire, an act that threatens the status quo and public order.

"The Executioner" isn't bad, but, to me, feels a little melodramatic and overwrought, too long and too extravagant; Budrys is still talking our ears off long after we have gotten the point.  I think the intellectual issues addressed here are less interesting than those discussed in "The Burning World;" nobody today believes in trial by ordeal or trial by combat and very few would advocate a rigidly stratified society or strict eugenics laws, but debates over how much power the government should have and the extent of individuals' right to self defense are alive and well.  The human relationships and emotional crises described here in "The Executioner" are less compelling and affecting than those Budrys wrote about in "Go and Behold Them."  Despite its popularity with editors, this is not Budrys's best work in this collection.

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The Unexpected Dimension is a quite good collection, definitely worth the classic SF fan's time.