Who Goes There?

This is it, the last post of the year, and also the last entry in my year-long tribute to that classiest of genre magazines: F&SF. I felt it only fitting to tackle a work by someone who was a long-time contributor to F&SF, and also from what I can tell this might be the only “complete novel” ever published in the magazine, all the others being serials. Algis Budrys enjoyed a long and productive life, and even got his start in the field early, being barely out of his teens when his first story was published in 1952. He was born in 1931 to Lithuanian parents, in what was then East Prussia, which later became German and then Russian territory. The family moved to the US when Budrys was five years old, and he spent some of his childhood in New Jersey (my home state), which no doubt played a part in the setting of today’s story. English was presumably his second language, which didn’t stop him from picking up the pen at a very young age and proving himself, over the course of just a few years, to be one of the finest wordsmiths in ’50s SF (for however much that’s worth). By the time he turned thirty he had already written such acclaimed novels as Who? and Rogue Moon, which, while flawed, are some of the most philosophically demanding reads of the pre-New Wave era, gaining him a reputation as a writer’s writer.

By past the early ’60s, Budrys’s output went down considerably, to the point where after that decade he would write only two novels: Michaelmas in 1977 and Hard Landing in 1992. While he wrote little short fiction, he kept busy and stayed a presence in the field in other ways, namely as critic and editor. He at first did the review collumn for Galaxy, before moving to F&SF, where he would stay for about 15 years. Also, around the same time Hard Landing was published, he staerted editing the ambitious semi-pro magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction. More controversially he was also a judge for the Scientology-backed Writers of the Future contest, and a long-time editor of the annual anthologies that organization put togehter, although Brudrys was not himself a Scientologist. Hard Landing was not the last work of fiction of his published in his lifetime, but it feels like a farewell to something, on top of being Budrys’s most formally complex novel, even if at about 45,000 words it barely counts as a novel.

Placing Coordinates

While its publication date is sometimes given as 1993, Hard Landing was first published in the October-November 1992 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unless Kristine Kathryn Rusch was lying or mistaken, this version is “the entire text” of the novel. The only way you can get it in-print is from Gollancz, either as an ebook or as part of a paperback omnibus with The Iron Thorn and Michaelmas.

Enhancing Image

We open with a document delving into the accidental death of a mysterious man, one by the name of Nelville Sealman, who got electrocuted at a railway station. To make a long story short, Sealman is one step short of being a John Doe, as his documentation turns out to be forged: he seemed to have borrowed the name of another Nelville Sealman, who had died in infancy in 1932, and he has no friends or next of kin. Nobody came to identify him. Authorities would only have the foggiest notion of who he was based on what he had on his person, which is not much. Doing some basic math tells us the story, at least at the time of Sealman’s death, is set in 1975. Of course, Sealman is not really Sealman, nor is he even a human being, but a humanoid alien named Selmon, who had crash-landed on Earth, in New Jersey, in the late 1940s, along with four others of his kind, although one of them had died from his injuries shortly after the landing. The deceased’s alien idenity is only made clear once an autopsy is performed and the National Registry of Pathological Anomalies (NRPA) enters the picture. Think The X-Files, which is funny because Hard Landing‘s magazine publication preceded that show’s premiere by mere months. Speaking of funny things, there’s a local pathologist named Albert Camus, which must be awkward for him since I assume the famous French writer was still a thing in this novel’s universe. (How come you never meet anyone named Abe Lincoln?) There’s also a certain Dr. William Henshaw, who appears to be a minor character at first but who will figure majorly into the plot.

The plot, such as it is, is not really the novel’s focus, for there isn’t much of a linear beat-by-beat plot but rather a Cerberus or hydra of plot threads, which happen in tandem with each other and which all sprout from the same seed. The “hard landing” of the novel’s title would have far-reaching ramifications, not least for the four (then three) survivors, especially Arvan (human name Jack Mullica) and Ravashan, with the third, Eikmo, mostly staying off-screen to do whatever business he does. Budrys ignores Eikmo, or rather refrains from giving us his perspective, for pretty much the entire novel; but this turns out to be quite deliberate rather than an oversight. As for Mullica (I’m calling him that for the rest of the review) and Ravashan, they serve as dual protagonists, being the two perspectives we shift to the most frequently. I say “the two perspectives” because despite this novel’s brevity, there’s a surprising number of those, including a fictionalized version of Brudrys himself. The, I guess you could say “gimmick” with Hard Landing is that it’s framed as a mix of fiction and non-fiction, between first-person accounts, documents, and interview recordings. It’s also not always clear who the POV character is, such that much of one’s effort when reading this novel goes into putting the pieces together—and of course these narrators are not always reliable. On paper there’s little (aside from some salty language) that would not be able to see print in, say, the years when Budrys was in his prime as a fiction writer (the ’50s and pre-New Wave ’60s), but the way in which Budrys goes about telling his story is decidedly postmodern.

Mullica and Selmon meet in 1975, in which the latter really does die in a railway accident. The rest of the novel mostly recounts how we got to this point, with the two main perspectives because Mullica’s and Ravashan. We find out early on that Mullica, despite being an alien, had gotten married a while back—he and Eikmo both, “Eikmo and his fish-store lady,” although Selmon and Ravashan remain bachelors. Mullica and Ravashan are like the plot threads of this novel in that despite starting at the same place (the crashed ship), they go in very different directions. One thing that stands out obviously with Hard Landing, and which people (on the rare occasion that anyone talks about this novel, for despite getting a Locus poll spot and Nebula nomination it’s quite obscure) are a little too quick to point out, is that it’s a dramatization of the immigrant experience—specifically the white European immigrant experience in the first half of the 20th century. Mullica and company are of course not of white European ancestry, but they pass for white, and Margery (Mullica’s wife) even mistakes him for a Soviet defector when they first meet. That Mullica and the others have rather unusual “equipment” on the inside (which does become plot-relevant) is beside the point. If readers nowadays seem indifferent to Hard Landing, or those few who read it in the first place, it’s because of two things: that Budrys’s use of multiple narrators is a smokescreen for what is really a simple and ultimately old-fashioned narrative (even in 1992 the idea of aliens landing and mixing in with everyday humans was not new), and I would also say the more unfair sentiment that the narrative of the continental European immigrant in America is no longer relevant.

There’s much debate as to how autobiographical a work of fiction can be. The idea that the author or creator puts at least a bit of themself into their work is in itself a relatively new one, in terms of understanding art, so it stands to reason that, for instance, when we read Hamlet or Macbeth we’re peeking into the mind of an Englishman who’s now been dead for over 400 years. But then there are authors who unabashedly project themselves onto their work, sometimes brazenly, to such an extent that the work really does become semi-autobiographical. Philip Roth basically made a career out of blurring the line between his real life and the lives of his main characters; there’s even a fictionalized version of himself in a few of his novels, most famously The Plot Against America. Even in the realm of genre SF there was a precedent for fiction-as-autobiography when Budrys wrote his final novel, namely with the case of Philip K. Dick. I decided to find out for myself, and Budrys had indeed reviewed Dick’s famously (or infamously) loopy novel-tract hybrid VALIS, for F&SF, although I was disappoint to find that he had very little to say about the novel as a reflection of what was clearly Dick’s mental illness and his attempt to cope with his condition. Maybe it was something one could not say in a book review that presumably thousands of people would read, including possibly Dick himself. But, whether he was genuine about it or not, Budrys’s assumption that VALIS was an attempt on Dick’s part to form a new Gnostic Christian sect was a tragic misreading of that book. Similarly it would be a tragic mistake to overlook that with his final novel, Budrys, as the son of immigrants, was writing about what it was like to be assimilated into American culture.

Mullica strives and eventually succeeds at basically living a normal life, albeit with a brush or two with low-level crime thanks to Margery’s brother (there’s the implication he runs drugs or dirty money, but not much comes with it, maybe intentionally on Budrys’s part), while Ravashan’s path is a lot more… let’s say ambitious. He gets involved with the US military and even starts to work for an unnamed and amoral congressman he calls “Yankee,” and he even founds NRPA. Yes, the department that investigates alien sightings and other anomalous activities was started by an alien. It’s called irony. Ravashan also believes he won’t be able to consult a physician for his problem, on account of keeping his alien nature a secret, so he gets the bright idea to see a veterinarian instead—who happens to be Henshaw. One of my quibbles with this novel is that its brevity and economy of words work as much against it as for it, particularly with character relationships. There’s quite a bit you could do with Ravashan and Henshaw’s interactions, but Budrys doesn’t do as much as he could’ve. Think about it: Ravashan, who by the back end of the novel has become unspeakably powerful, albeit preferring to work behind the scenes, is able to hide the fact that he is not technically a white man—that is to say he’s able to pass as a white man. But Henshaw is black. I bring this up now because Budrys brings it up. Henshaw is a well-educated black man, and is indeed the only POC in a cast of lily-white folks. On paper he’s potentially the most interesting character in the novel, but, perhaps because he feared he would screw things up, Budrys makes only step above minimal use of him. This is especially a shame because it turns out that Henshaw is one of the narrators, although this is not revealed until late. Hard Landing suffers, if anything, by being too short.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s implied that Ravashan has contracted AIDS, at a time when the Reagan administration had not yet made it publicly known, which is how he goes out. In the strangest and maybe most provocative scene in the novel Ravashan pulls an As I Lay Dying and tells us the scene of his own death, and Henshaw subsequently burning his body so as not to leave evidence of an alien having lived on Earth. How this could be relayed to us is mysterious at first, but later we find that Henshaw has tried to write a novel based on his experiences with Ravashan and NRPA, although he’s not able to finish it. Murrica, depending on how you look at it, is not as lucky. Remember Eikmo? He’s back. He apparently got news of Selmon’s death and assumed the worst, because he tracks down Mullica to his home and thinks he had killed their mutual friend. After an altercation, both are dead, Mullica killed by Eikmo and Eikmo in turn killed by an enraged Margery. And then there were none. The scene plays like a fucking tragic play, although the exact facts of the exchange are called into question. The reality is that there is no objective viewpoint, and at the very end of the novel Budrys perhaps overplays his hand by his fictionalized self saying: “In fact, I could have made up the whole thing, couldn’t I?” Either he has a moment of doubt about whether his readers got the message or he’s mocking the obviousness of the narrator (or narrators) being unreliable. The latter is more likely, but either way I’m not a fan of the very end of this novel.

A Step Farther Out

That’s it, my last review of the year. I’ve come to realize that my ability to deliver reviews on time has been slipping as of late; partly this is because when I write, I write a lot, which takes time. I’m also quite lazy. I had finished reading Hard Landing almost a week ago but did not start working on my review until yesterday. I do, however, have a fun announcement to make in my forecast post tomorrow. Stay tuned.

See you next time.

And if I don’t see you again, Happy New Year.