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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\u2019s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, with at least one lost vintage sci-fi short story in every episode.

\u201cHe was in some ways the best writer of his kind around. He made sentences come alive better than most writers. I\u2019m not talking just about science fiction writers.\u201d The words of writer, editor, and literary agent Frederik Pohl\u2013at 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\u2019 apartment on a spring day in 1936. Adolf Hitler, \u201cin an open black Mercedes with his arm propped up. I\u2019m sure he had an iron bar up his sleeve, because he couldn\u2019t have kept his arm that particular way for so long otherwise.\u201d

In 1936, when his father failed to get the Paris posting he\u2019d requested, he was assigned to New York instead. Budrys\u2019s parents, desperate to survive in Depression-era America, ended up running a chicken farm in rural New Jersey.

\u201cMy 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,\u201d 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\u2019s name as the author, but you will know the man who wrote The Barbarians is Algis Budrys\u2026\xa0

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\u2014and inescapable! Second Childhood by Clifford D. Simak.

\xa0That\u2019s next week on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, with at least one lost vintage sci-fi short story in every episode.

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