Who Goes There?

A famous and well-worn “takedown” of criticism, usually said by artists who are deeply insecure about their craft, is that critics aren’t artists, or if they’re artists then they don’t have the talent to match the art they’re criticizing. “If you can’t do something yourself then why criticize it?” sounds reasonable until you realize nobody would be able to criticize a bad piece of woodwork unless they’ve worked in carpentry, or nobody would be able to criticize the comfortability of a pair of shoes unless they’re a shoemaker. I’m getting a bit sidetracked. Thing is, Algis Budrys is a notable response to this non-criticism because he is one of the few people in the history of genre SF to ssucceed as a writer, critic, and editor. He started off as a very promising short story writer (debuting the same year as Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley, the early ’50s were insane), before showing as much success with novels, and then mostly moving away from fiction in the ’60s in favor of criticism. Budry’s writing didn’t always live up to his own standards, but one can’t doubt he helped raise literary standards in genre SF.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted a decent number of times. Where to start? The Tenth Galaxy Reader (ed. Frederik Pohl), Alpha Two (ed. Robert Silverberg), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, and Frederik Pohl), and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg). There’s also the Budrys collection Blood and Burning. This is all well and good, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” has apparently fallen out of copyright; you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

Rufus Sollenar is the current head of the Sollenar Corporation and the new owner of EmpaVid, a machine that’s set to push TV to the next level. However, as Ermine, an advisor from the International Association of Broadcasters, informs Our Anti-Hero™, there’s trouble on the horizon. Sollenar’s long-time competitor, Cortwright Burr, has been in talks with the Martians about a machine that might outcompete EmpaVid if put on the market but whose properties Ermine is super-vague about; in fairness to the man he doesn’t really know what Burr is up to. The point is that if Burr’s machine is what Ermine thinks it is then the IAB (who are basically a board of investors) will ditch Sollenar in favor of Burr. Sollenar, being a totally reasonable businessman, decides to take matters into his own hands, i.e., to kill Burr and steal the mystery machine for himself; this will turn out to have tragic and very strange consequences.

If it seems like I’m frontloading this review with more synopsis straight from the tap than usual, it’s because Budrys frontloads his story with exposition—only it’s not as straightforward as that. There’s some context that would be helpful that Budrys, for some reason, refrains from telling us. In the first few pages we’re told that this is set at some point in the future, sometime after 1998, and that the Martians, “a dying race” (when are they not), are trading with human civilization like it’s no big thing. This raises some questions that go unanswered, and while this may be so because these questions are not strictly plot-relevant, the answers would add some background flavor the story is otherwise lacking. We know basically nothing about Sollenar aside from his having inherited a powerful company and that he seems used to always getting his way; again, this is all the plot needs to work, but it is unfortunately lacking in character. We arguably learn more about Ermine, who is deliberately made out to be sort of an enigma, than Our Anti-Hero™, and I don’t think Budrys intended this.

I don’t usually say this with regards to length, but “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” could stand to be a couple thousand words longer. ISFDB says it’s a novelette, and while I haven’t run the Gutenberg text through a word processor I’d wager it just barely reaches the 7,500-word mark. Even taking the exposition into account the pacing on this thing is lightning-quick, and not strictly to its benefit. I’m pretty sure Budrys would get on my case for saying this, but this story reads like a pastiche of Dick’s early work: the pacing, the sense of irony, and most importantly the playing with the line between reality and illusion. Once Sollenar fails to kill Burr (so he thinks) the story descends into borderline horror of the surreal kind, which would almost feel more at home in the pages of Weird Tales than Galaxy—if only Weird Tales were still around in 1960. The science-fictional element could easily be replaced with fantasy anyway, and might even work better in that context. Sure, Budrys wrote a story about the future of TV, but that’s an obstacle that can be easily overcome; and anyway who says a fantasy setting can’t have a bit of electricity. The machine the Martians gave Burr, which is now in Sollenar’s possession, may as well be magic. Unfortunately the only American fantasy outlet when Budrys had at that time was Fantastic, which did not pay so well.

This is not to say it’s a bad story. It reads very well, Budrys has a fluency with English that would not give the impression it’s his second language, the pacing (like I said) is fast as a whip, and there is a weird strangeness that one doesn’t normally see in SF of this vintage. Burr is not really a character so much as a ghost that haunts Sollenar, mute, silently judging, looking “like a corpse. Or worse.” Worse yet, after trying to kill Burr, Sollenar is now on the IAB’s shit list; not only might he lose his business but he might also lose his skin. Ermine plays the role of the strictly rational bystander here—so blocked off from emotion that he had all his nerve endings severed so that he literally can’t feel anything. We thus are dealing with a literal zombie and a man who, while not dead, has all the feeling of a corpse. The enjoyment in reading this story comes from watching a not very good person enter a downward spiral as a result of his actions. We’re told, even from the introductory blurb, that Sollenar is likely to meet a bad end; how he meets that end is the real question. It’s a twisty and rather morbid tale that would arguably have benefited from Budrys giving it more time in the oven.

There Be Spoilers Here

Turns out Burr really did die, but—probably because he knew Sollenar had it out for his—decided to give his competitor one last fuck-you in the form of the machine the Martians had given him. The machine, we learn much later, creates what amounts to a waking dream for the auditor, which can be used on the person with the machine or on someone else. The results of such a machine would be unspeakably disastrous, considering the user can basically induce hallucinations in other people, and I’m not sure why the Martians built such a machine in the first place, let alone are willing to sell it to humans. Burr has in fact been dead for most of the story, but he induced a continuing hallucination in Sollenar such that he torments him from beyond the grave. This indirectly leads to Sollenar’s death at the hands of Ermine, but in what I suppose is a moment of grace he uses the machine to give Ermine the illusion of his senses having returned. Sollenar knows the IAB will have him assassinated no matter what at this point, so why not give his assassin a farewell gift.

That has to count for something.

A Step Farther Out

It could be that for personal reasons I’ve been experiencing some gnarly sleep depravation (we’re talking two or three hours of sleep a day) for the past few days, but I was struggling to come up with things to say about this one. My brain was and still is a-fog. In a way this is appropriate since “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” is a surreal narrative, but unfortunately it does not lead to clear-minded literary analysis. There is, of course, the chance that there isn’t much to say about this story because there simply—well—isn’t much to say about it. This is strange, because it’s not hackwork and Budrys’s good stuff lends itself to discussion, if only to criticize it; but then Budrys’s work tends to be more lucid than this story. It could be in attempting to write a nightmare masquerading as an SF narrative, taking after Philip K. Dick whether he intentionally did so or not, Budrys wrote something that can be experienced fine but not so easily rationalized. I’ve mentioned this before, but had Weird Tales still been around in the early ’60s Budrys could’ve reworked the story into a fantasy; it would not have taken much effort and might’ve actually improved the thing.

See you next time.