tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670543499274741427.post7373927937567996574..comments2024-03-26T17:54:54.592+01:00Comments on Speculiction...: Review of The Unexpected Dimension by Algis BudrysUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670543499274741427.post-64479955072977198892016-09-06T08:54:31.861+02:002016-09-06T08:54:31.861+02:00For sure this is a very solid debut collection. Y...For sure this is a very solid debut collection. You can really feel that each piece is revised and reworked until is shines - subtly, but shines. Blood and Burning was on my list of Budrys' works to read, now it will probably be read sooner than later as I try to devote the remainder of 2016 to writers deserving greater recognition. <br /><br />Interesting that you should describe Budrys' stories as dark, or at least 'fairly dark.' :) For certain he is more in tune with writers like Orwell or Huxley, writers who took a more realistic (or what some might think of as pessimistic) view toward humanity's capabilities - the vices as much as the virtues. I'm on the realist side myself, which means Budrys' delicately cautionary tales strike a real chord. Whether or not Budrys forms a waypoint on the journey to Tiptree Jr., however, is something I'm not convinced of. I put a lot of Tiptree Jr.'s work, for as great as it is, beyond dark, with one toe or foot in paranoid land. In the stories of his I've read, Budrys covers a wide gamut of territory, from memory to politics, economics to religion, etc. Each story seems to be a piece unto itself. With Tiptree Jr., however, I get the impression that each story, for as unique as it may be, is extracted from a much smaller pool of ideas. There is a certain fear of men, sex as a tool for oppression, of the imminence of mortality, of cultural domination - these are the common threads to her work, appearing time and again. With Budrys, I get the feeling the only real common thread to his stories is a strong underlying sense of humanism, and the need to protect it in the face of interests which would seek to undermine it. But do correct me if I'm wrong. I've read enough of Tiptree Jr. and Budrys to form an initial impression, but perhaps not enough to make a fully qualified statement.<br /><br />Regardless, thanks for the great comment. (P.s. Kornbluth is another writer deserving greater recognition - as I assume you are well aware. Alas...) Jessehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07796098208589965362noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7670543499274741427.post-64736412271125364762016-09-06T01:58:27.072+02:002016-09-06T01:58:27.072+02:00Budrys was twenty-three when he wrote 'The End...Budrys was twenty-three when he wrote 'The End of Summer,' just as a detail.<br /><br />Yeah, Budrys was and is highly underrated. There was a time when he looked to be the most likely candidate to make an adult literature out of SF, partly because he was an interesting thinker and partly because of his adeptness at infusing mainstream lit techniques into SF. I see you've reviewed 'The Silent Eyes of Time' from the mid-1970s, so that's the kind of thing I mean and wanted to see more of. But so is the beautiful way that WHO? is structured -- and Budrys wrote that back in the 1950s.<br /><br />As regards THE UNEXPECTED DIMENSION, I think there's something interesting in each of the stories in this collection except maybe 'Go And Behold Them' and I first read them when I was a kid in the 1960s. (And I've reread them many times since.) But the style and Budrys's recourse to or avoidance of then-standard plot moves in his short fiction of the 1950s is still a little too redolent of the writing-level of the genre then for my taste. (Except for "The Distand Sound of Engines, which is arguably a little Hemingwayesque masterpiece.) <br /><br />If you can find BLOOD AND BURNING, a collection from the latter 1970s, I'd say that book has his most achieved stories (which are mostly from the 1960s and '70s). I'm thinking particularly of stories like "Be Merry" and "For Love" and "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night."<br /><br />IMO, there's a lineage of (fairly dark) SF that runs from the short fiction of C.M. Kornbluth in the 1950s to those of James Tiptree in the 1970s, and Budrys -- in stories like "For Love" -- seems to me the missing link between those two writers.Mark Pontinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11988614518618495319noreply@blogger.com