INTRODUCTION to
BLOOD & BURNING
Algis Budrys
I HAVE BEEN a professional writer some twenty-five years, now. This fact sometimes comes as a bit of a shock to the rather naive face that peers back at me from my shaving mirror. So does the thought that, after years as an editor, a print production consultant, an advertising and public relations man, a bicycle hobbyist with one repair manual to his credit and an anecdotal book on bicycles due to be published, a political speechwriter and campaign advisor, a biographer of Harry S Truman, a motor vehicle tester and columnist, a soccer organizer, a complexly middleclass householder and retired poultry farmer, I am nevertheless always introduced as "a science fiction writer." And rightly so. The nonwriting is done for the liking of it, or the occasional need of a paycheck. The writing is done because I cannot help but do it. And it is usually in some of the many forms recognized as "science fiction," though far from always.
"Science fiction"--or SF, as I learned to call it from Judith Merril--takes up where unreality leaves off. It is a superb tool for exploring what is real about people and about the nature of the universe in general. Most fiction is devoted to perpetuating easy, comforting ideas that make life softer for us. Some science fiction does the same, sometimes with more ingenuity. All science fiction, like any other human expression, is full of hidden flaws of self-delusion. But in some cases it has at least no deliberate flaws of that sort. I leave it to you to decide how well I hew to that ideal. But I can tell you I try, very hard.
The publishers of this volume have asked me to tell you something about each of the stories here. I have done so, in a shortish blurb preceding each one. I hope you do not find me immodest, and I hope you are not dismayed by some of my motivations and the sources of my inspiration. To the best of my ability to determine, they are different only in detail from those of any other writer I know, or have reliably reamed about. But any given story springs from my general background as a human being who is unreservedly bound to express reactions to what he notes around him...that is, who is an artist.
It so happens I write more successfully than I draw, sculp, sing, or act. And so I tell stories, within which it is usually not too difficult to see what has been of particular interest to me this time. But what is of general interest, and why? It's a big world, with much happiness and charm to be found in it. Why do I, for instance, choose to write stories--not all of them "science fiction," or even "SF," but obviously all from the same worldview--which can be aptly collected under the descriptive title, Blood & Burning? People have said I write about maniacs. Why do I like maniacs so much?
Well, few of them are maniacs to me. They are people whose motivations are focussed on some single object, so that I can show them to you better. In real life, such people would give the impression of mania. But many of my characters have other thoughts, and do other deeds at other times; it's that they're not doing them right this minute. Some of them are only just entering upon whatever singleminded activity confronts their consciousness as the story opens. Others are going to abandon their immediate drama as soon as the story ends, though they will certainly not be the same as they once were.
None of them does anything I don't believe is possible to a driven but logical person. Although, of course, some of them are doomed by their actions in the story. I like them. None of them--certainly not the crippled ex-officer with his Dobermans, or the overwrought architect in Panorama Towers, or the man who called his neighbors chicken punks--is villainous to me. I love them. I do not love Dusty Haverman, but, then, where is he to be found, that someone might love him? I feel for him as much as he could feel for you or me. I love Austin Gelvarry.
Nevertheless, I am a writer because when I was very young I laid eyes on the great maniac. I stood in the window of an apartment in what was then Konigsberg, East Prussia, and watched Adolf Hitler go by in the back of his open black Mercedes. I watched the onlookers--my neighbors, their friends, my kindergarten playmates, the adolescent boys and girls who lived in that city where Immanuel Kant lies buried in a cathedral, the impeccable poliziers who directed traffic and were always so helpful--lose all control of themselves. They ran for the bushes in the park and on our front lawn, tugging at their clothes, clutching at each other, fainting, soiling themselves, and making an indescribable sound. For someone who has just been given his first book of instructive Dore-illustrated tales from the New Testament, who has just emerged from a fascination with matters of the toilet, and who at other times had been coddled and fawned over by some of those same confident and knowledgeable inhabitants of a rational and essentially conformable world, this sort of thing comes as a revelation. In short, when I was four, the thunderclap fell upon me that I was come to consciousness in a world of werewolves.
I would not put it so strongly now. And it wasn't all that much longer before I discovered that I had no business holding myself out to myself as an aloof--and blameless--observer who need have no fear of the full moon. You give me the right reason, and I will be as hairy as the next lycanthrope, in an instant. Or something as close to it--as foolish, as hopeful, as essentially optimistic. They really thought he was making them better, you know. He could do it to them not because he promised conquest and material comfort--those were means and products. What he promised them, I really think, was that they would no longer be constrained by circumstance from being able to do the noble and right thing every time. No matter what.
And that is hope. All my people have hope.
--Algis Budrys
Evanston, Illinois
1978
Copyright © 1978 Algis Budrys
TomorrowSF Vol. 10.7 September 24,1998