Three 1950s stores from Budrys' Inferno

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Budrys' Inferno, a 1960s paperback collection of nine stories by Algis Budrys first published in science fiction magazines in the 1950s.  The collection is dedicated to Damon Knight, and in the introduction Budrys tells us the stories were selected by Thomas A. Dardis.

In our last blog post we read the second story in the collection, 1958's "Between the Dark and the Daylight."  Today let's read the first, fourth and fifth pieces.

"Silent Brother"  (1956)

This one appears to have been a hit.  After it first appeared in John W. Campbell's Astounding it was chosen by Judith Merril for the 1957 edition of her famous Year's Greatest SF anthology series, and would go on to be translated into French, German and Japanese.  I actually own that edition of Year's Greatest SF, and see that, in her intro to "Silent Brother," Merril praises Budrys fulsomely, jokes about his profusion of pennames ("Silent Brother" appeared under the pseudonym "Paul Janvier") and says he is "from Jersey;" Budrys was born in Konigsberg in 1931 but, his Lithuanian family in exile after the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, Budrys spent his youth in the greatest state of the union.

Harvey Cable is an astronaut and engineer whose work was essential to making Earth' first interstellar voyage successful, but he wasn't able to fly to Alpha Centauri himself with his comrades because he had been severely injured in a test flight accident.  When his friends return from their unprecedented adventure, the invalided Cable envies the public acclaim they receive.  But soon he has other things on his mind--mysterious changes around his lonely house which suggest there is either an intruder in his home, or that in his sleep he is able to move freely, as if he had never been injured.  Whoever it is, a stranger or his own sleep-walking self, is constructing in the basement an electronic device that the waking Cable can make neither head nor tail of!

This is a good story, a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy about becoming a superman who will never be lonely again in a world of plenty and peace.  Cable's friends, out on some alien planet, were united with benevolent immaterial aliens, and have come to share these beneficent beings with the rest of humanity.  An Earthling living in symbiosis with such an alien is super healthy (in mere days Cable's ruined eye, useless legs, and lost teeth are regenerated) and can walk through walls and perform feats of technical wizardry.  Soon every person on Earth will have such a little friend and all our problems will be solved and we will be able to explore the universe.

I thought Budrys's handling of the scenes in which Cable tried to figure out the mystery of what was going on in his house clever and entertaining, and Budrys also provides us a sort of life-affirming story arc in which Cable misses and envies his friends but then learns that they have been thinking and caring about him all along.  This is a story about people getting along which isn't mawkish or saccharine and doesn't show its hand until the end--thumbs up!

Budrys' Inferno was printed several times in Great Britain under the title The Furious Future

"The Skirmisher" (1957)

This is a brief noirish detective story about a time traveler from the future who comes back to 1957 to set elaborate traps that kill people before they can produce the offspring whom, for unspecified reasons, somebody in the future doesn't want to have to deal with.  Maybe the most noteworthy element of the story is that the reader is expected to figure out that the assassin is a time traveler.  The meticulous planning of the deadly Rube Goldberg "accidents" in this story reminded me of Budrys's intricate descriptions of Harvey Cable's methods of investigating what is going on in his house in "Silent Brother," but while that story had an emotional arc and was optimistic, "The Skirmisher" is cynical and a little gimmicky, and too short to really develop characters or a world.   Acceptable.

"The Skirmisher" was first published in Infinity Science Fiction and has only ever resurfaced in Budrys collections.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" (1959)

Like "The Skirmisher," "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" concerns an outsider who puts into motion an elaborate scheme to murder somebody.  A space alien living in disguise on the Earth wants to start World War III and hires Redfern, an English adventurer who now lives in America and does things like gunrunning for a living, to murder a communist diplomat who is visiting Washington.  "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is composed of scenes that feel like they were lifted out of espionage fiction: Redfern in a hotel room, trying to remain cool as a cucumber as he negotiates with the alien and receives high tech gadgets, Redfern's anxiety boiling over as he talks to a British diplomat in the shadowy corner of a restaurant, Redfern obsessively checking his watch as he drives down the highway in a stolen car, trying to reach the aliens' spaceship before blast off.  Will the diplomat from the Warsaw Pact be killed?  Will war erupt between East and West?  Will Redfern get to the alien ship on time?

I liked the car driving scenes, and Budrys starts the story in the car, in medias res (all those negotiations are related in flashbacks), and thus gets the reader's attention in a way that telling the story in strict chronological order might not.  And while the complicated crime stuff in "The Skirmisher" is the meat of that story, all the lurid spy and space alien skulduggery in "The Man Who Tasted Ashes" is used to construct a psychological portrait of a warped personality; I can recommend this one.

"The Man Who Tasted Ashes" first saw print in Damon Knight's If, and would go on to appear in an anthology of If stories and a 1966 book of SF stories designed for use in schools.

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More 1950s stories by Algis Budrys in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!