In my dream, it’s early morning, and I’m wandering a small cruise ship similar to the one Irene and I took to the Galapagos in 2001 and Antarctica in 2005. It doesn’t seem as if anyone else is awake as I head to the dining area in search of breakfast, but when I get there, Ajay and Edna Budrys are already seated. They’re the only ones there.

It doesn’t bother me that Ajay is dead in the real world. Actually, I’m not even aware of it in the dream, and so chat with them nonchalantly about what’s available for breakfast, and the places we’ll be touring that day. Places which, now that I’m awake, I can no longer remember.

I don’t usually eat an elaborate breakfast, maybe only a bagel or croissant, but I have trouble finding one. The tables are filled with food completely inappropriate for breakfast—hot dogs in buns, marbled cakes with mounds of frosting, thing like that. Finally, after much searching, I do find a bagel, and return to the table to talk with Ajay and Edna.

As I sit, in comes Susan Casper. Gardner Dozois isn’t awake yet, and so it’s just the four of us for awhile. We get to talking about reviews of Ajay’s books, and Susan mentions a particularly devastating one, and how she wanted to contact that critic, whom she knew personally, to see what was up with his undeserved slam.

Bells ring, telling us that the first boat is going ashore. I want to be on it, to see the sights in the early morning light, when fewer people are up and about. Then I slowly come awake, still with no idea what sort of place we’ll be touring that day, but eager to see it anyway.

Algis Budrys, or Ajay as he was known to his friends, passed away earlier today. His father was the head of the Lithuanian government in exile, so when Ajay came with him to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of five, he received an early education in seeing the world with outsider eyes. That sense of the alien helped him well in his future writing career. Ajay went on to write many classic novels, notably Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas.

But he was also a teacher, and that was his role when I first met him in the flesh, as opposed to on the page. It was 1979, and I was a student attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. (My other teachers were Robin Scott Wilson, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm.) Before Ajay decided that Writers of the Future was the preferred path, he had been a strong proponent of the Clarion workshopping method, and he was a wonderful teacher.

But aside from having an excellent understanding of how to build a story, he also helped provide one of the more memorable incidents of my six weeks in East Lansing. (more…)

The most recent issue of Publishers Weekly ran an interview with Lucius Shepard, published in conjunction with that writer’s upcoming best-of collection from Subterranean Press. For some reason, this sparked a memory of an entry in Mike Ashley’s The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Lists, which was put out by Virgin Books back in 1982.

One of the lists in that book was from Algis Budrys, and titled “10 Most Promising New Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers.” I’d remembered that Shepard had been on that list, but I was drawing a blank as to the identities of the other nine writers. So I pulled down the book from the shelf and found the full list of the 10 writers whom Ajay thought showed the most promise 26 years ago. They were:

1. Paul Preuss
2. Parke Godwin
3. Arsen Darnay
4. Michael Swanwick
5. Somtow Sucharitkul
6. Victor Besaw
7. Lucius Shepard
8. Madeline Robins
9. Robert L. Forward
10. Robert Frazier

Wrote Budrys at the time: “‘New’ means people to whom John Varley is a Grand Old Man, which means that most names won’t mean much in Britain yet, but I would advise any reader to keep an eye open for stories by all of the following. They won’t be disappointed.” He added: “Besaw is a retired schoolteacher who has just begun to have his science-fantasy novels published. The rest are, in the main, young and upcoming.” (more…)