History was repeating itself; there were moats and nobles in Pennsylvania and vassals in Manhattan and the barbarian hordes were overrunning the land. The Barbarians by Algis Budrys, that’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, with at least one lost vintage sci-fi short story in every episode.

“He was in some ways the best writer of his kind around. He made sentences come alive better than most writers. I’m not talking just about science fiction writers.” The words of writer, editor, and literary agent Frederik Pohl–at 89 about Algis Budrys.

Budrys was born in 1931 in what was then East Prussia, Germany. At the end of his life Budrys still remembered what he had seen from the second-story window of his parents’ apartment on a spring day in 1936. Adolf Hitler, “in an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I’m sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn’t have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise.”

In 1936, when his father failed to get the Paris posting he’d requested, he was assigned to New York instead. Budrys’s parents, desperate to survive in Depression-era America, ended up running a chicken farm in rural New Jersey.

“My big breakthrough came when Miss Anderson, who owned the general store in Dorothy, New Jersey, gave me a bunch of unsold magazines, including Astonishing Stories, edited by Frederik Pohl,” Budrys said. And his love for science fiction began.

He wrote 10 novels and about 135 short stories.

When you turn to page 58 in If Worlds of Science Fiction in February 1958 you might be surprised to see John Sentry’s name as the author, but you will know the man who wrote The Barbarians is Algis Budrys…

Next week on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Achieving immortality is only half of the problem. The other half is knowing how to live with it once it's been made possible—and inescapable! Second Childhood by Clifford D. Simak.

That’s next week on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, with at least one lost vintage sci-fi short story in every episode. Support the show

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