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AJAY

                                              November 25, 2005

Some quotations of Algis Budrys.
                                             LOVECRAFT

Discussing New Wave SF, in the
August 1968 issue of Galaxy:

   There can be no quarrel with an
   attempt to get out of the old
   ruts; the world *is* chilly,
   few of us are heroes, and not
   many ideals support much
   weight.  It was always so, but
   perhaps there is something more          SHARPER_LANCES
   valid for fiction to do than
   simply to inspire.  Maybe it
   *can*, instead, show us ways in
   which we personally can cope,
   without at the same time
   demanding that we give up our
   jobs, tear up our mortgages and
   haunt hilltops, waiting to be           HEINLEIN
   picked up by talent scouts in
   flying saucers.



Further, discussing a Keith Laumer story:

   "Thunderhead" is an excellently told,
   exceptionable story about a man who does his
   duty.  In a way, it's a surefire yarn -- the
   kind that can't miss.  Yet this kind of story
   can be monstrously hard to write.  The hero is
   more faithful, more persevering, more
   resolute, more staminous than you or I could
   be, and one slip by the writer in describing
   his ever increasing problems could break the
   spell and turn him into a figure of pure corn.
   Where this kind of story gets its necessary
   tension, as a matter of fact, is in balancing
   the reader's true capabilities against the
   actions of this costume the author draws over
   him for a while.

   Seen in that light, what a writer does when he
   does a good job on a story like this is more
   of a feat than writing something by your own
   rules.

      
   There is nothing mysterious about the             
   separate elements of this story... [You         
   start with an idea for a situation, and    
   looking at the situtation from the outside,    
   you sketch out the things the protagonist       
   must do.]... Then you conceal their            
   linearity from the reader... by adopting a       
   viewpoint within this framework of events,       
   rather than one detached outside of it...  
                                                       BRAND_ECLECTICS
   I was much younger once... I _thought_ it
   would be easy.  (I still don't like
   stories in which the easy is made easier
   by coincidence, by dumb luck, by auctorial  
   intrusion, by hustling extra characters in     (The word "vulnerable"   
   out of the wings, by glossing over the         was added by me, where I  
   hard parts with offstage voices and sound      presume it was dropped by 
   effects.  I wonder if only the action          Galaxy's typesetting.  The 
   modes are to prove [vulnerable] to these       other bracketed passage is 
   well-known flaws.)                             a paraphrase.) 
 
       CHANCES_ARE 
 

Algis Budrys in the May 1969 issue of Galaxy: 
 
   Writing is a process wrung out of fear 
   overcome, as having written is a reward 
   of pure joy, and a man who thinks ahead 
   of time why he writes, and looks back on 
   his writing to see if it is indeed in the 
   tradition he was writing for, is a man 
   who is not brave enough for love, and not 
   triumphant enough for consummation.  He
   is dull -- deliberately, fearfully dull;
   slow beast -- and the good writers just
   aren't that way.


Algis Budrys in the July 1986 issue of "Fantasy
and Science Fiction":

   One cannot, I think, set out to produce a
   quality.  One must have that quality, and if
   one does, then in any mode it can usually
   overcome even extreme degrees of error and of
   outside criticism.  It has a thing within
   it, and we who perceive that thing, with
   whatever receptor and with whatever personal
   preference as to the details, are fortunate.



Algis Budrys in the May 1982 "Fantasy and Science
Fiction":

   Contrary to popular belief, few writers are
   so fortunate as to simply transcribe what the
   Muses bring them entire.  I believe Mickey
   Spillane does; perhaps one or two others.           LONG_SHADOW



Algis Budrys in the October 1969 issue of Galaxy:

   For one reason or another, lately, I've been
   thinking about what I've been doing.  This
   is something of a step for me, since I did
   go a considerable time without ever stopping
   to wonder systematically about what makes a
   book ...

   ... we confuse the expression with the inspiration.
   We look at the novel and we can see the long
   series of encodings ... with which the laboring
   creator spells out his vision of what flashed
   into his mind when the lightning struck him.

   The thing that happens to any creator, it seems
   to me, happens in an instant.  The rest is
   translation.

   A being qualified to live with lightnings ought
   to respect the sole source of its consciousness.

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