[This article updates our much briefer, earlier notice.]
Editor and author Algis “A.J.” Budrys died 9 June 2008. The cause of death has not been released, but he had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and had been suffering from diabetes for a long time. Born Algirdas Jonas Budrys in Königsberg, East Prussia (once and later Lithuania) on 9 January 1931, he was the son of the consul-general of the Lituanian government, which sent his family to the US in 1936.
After graduating from Columbia University, he worked as an editor for Gnome Press and Galaxy Science Fiction. He also wrote science fiction under his own name, as well as pseudonyms such as John A. Sentry, William Scarff, and Frank Mason. Of his fiction, Todd Mason writes “what might be his magnum opus, The Death Machine, a heavily symbolic sf novel that Fawcett Gold Medal issued as Rogue Moon (1960)… a cast of functionally insane characters deal with an enigma of an alien labyrinth/device on the moon, which seems to kill anything that passes through it, much like the transportation device the humans use to get to it and back to Earth, which also kills at the transmission point and reassembles a person at the destination, with no sense of the death in the ‘new’ transported person.”
Some of his other novels include: False Night (1954), Man of Earth (1956), Who? (1958), The Falling Torch (1959), Some Will Not Die (1961, expanded into False Night), The Iron Thorn (1967, aka The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn), Michaelmas (1977), and Hard Landing (1993).
Budrys lived in the Chicago area from the 1960s, and it was during that decade that he branched out of the sf world, editing for other local publishers, including Playboy. He was a book reviewer for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1975 to 1993 (he’d done the same for Galaxy from 1965 to 1971), and an instructor at the Clarion Writing Workshops.
In the 1980s, Budrys helped launch the Writers of the Future (and later the Illustrators of the Future) contests, served as coordinating judge for several years, and was the editor of the first eight volumes of the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future annual anthologies of winning and runner-up stories. He left the contests in the early 1990s, and in 1993, launched his own magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. The magazine was one of the first to transition from paper to web publication, and eventually succumbed in 2000.
The Internet Science Fiction Database has a remarkably complete bibliography. His brief autobiography from LoneStarCon 2, the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention (at which he was Guest of Honor) is here.
Budrys is survived by his wife, Edna F. Budrys; his sons Jeffrey, Steven, Timothy, and David; and his grandchildren Zia and Dexter. Visitation will be Friday from 3 to 9PM; the funeral service will be on Saturday at 10AM, both at Donnellan Family Funeral Home, 10045 Skokie Blvd (at Old Orchard Rd), Skokie, Illinois 60077 (847-675-1990). The funeral home has a guest book. Interment will be at Maryhill Cemetery. Donations in memory of Algis Budrys may be made to the American Diabetes Association, 30 N Michigan Ave, Suite 2015, Chicago, IL 60602; or to the American Cancer Society, 820 Davis St, Suite 400, Evanston, IL 60201.
Steven H Silver, who first reported his death, wrote for SFScope:
By the time I met Algis Budrys, I already knew him. After all, I had read his old Galaxy Bookshelf Reviews, his novels, his short stories… And when I met him, he was editing Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. It was still a paper magazine at that time, before AJ decided to try an experiment and go to electronic publication, one of the first sf magazines to try that approach.
I met AJ at Windycon, the local science fiction convention, where he was a fixture, and for the next few years, I saw him each year at the con. Eventually, he moved, temporarily, out to Los Angeles, where he was working more fully with the Writers of the Future organization, which he supported with his time and editorial efforts.
I only submitted one story to AJ, and he rejected it, with a lengthy letter that summed up one of the problems the piece had. There were too many characters, I either needed to cut it down to size, or expand it to a novel. Since we all know that expanding is easier than cutting, 90,000 additional words and voila, my first novel.
After AJ moved back to Evanston, I never had the chance to see him. We tried to get him to attend the Nebulas when they were in Chicago in 2005, but he didn’t feel up to it and we respected his decision. I had him in mind for a project that I think he would have found fun to participate in, but now it will never happen.
I’ll miss AJ, a friend I haven’t seen in too long a time.
—Steven H Silver
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Below are links to just a few of the many expressions of grief at his loss and gratitude for his life:
Dean Wesley Smith
Todd Mason
Ed Gorman
Gordon Van Gelder
Scott Edelman
William Sanders
Allen Steele
Please send us links to your own remembrances, and we’ll incude them here. Use the “Contact Us” link at the top of the page.