Algis Budrys (January 9, 1931 – June 9, 2008) was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He was also known under the pen names "Frank Mason," "Alger Rome," "John A. Sentry," "William Scarff," and "Paul Janvier."
I have seen Adolf Hitler, Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur . . . I have shaken Harry Truman's hand. I have seen the Graf Zeppelin . . . I have seen the swastika-chalked brick-halves that came through our windows at night, and I was playing in a sandbox in Manhattan the afternoon the Hindenburg cruised overhead on her way to a thunderstorm and her grave. I have been called a Nazi, a Communist, a clod, a petit bourgeois and a long-haired egg-head. I am, in short, a child of the twentieth century.
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Survivors include his wife Edna, four sons, David, Jeffrey, Steven and Timothy; and two grandchildren.
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His wedding ceremony in 1954 was attended by writers including Isaac Asimov.
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In 1961, he moved to Evanston, Illinois to work as an editor with Regency Books. He later held editing positions with Playboy Press. From 1969 to 1974, he was a public relations account manager in charge of International Truck for Young & Rubicam. That job got him involved with four-wheel-drive truck racing. He also was a bicycle mechanic, building his own bikes with top-end French and Italian components.
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His own magazine, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, was nominated for the Hugo award. He held a Locus Invisible Little Man award. He was also a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
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Attended the University of Miami in 1947-1949 and Columbia University 1950-1951.
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Budrys was his father's nom de guerre, and roughly means "Sentry," hence Budrys's use of the pseudonym John A. Sentry.
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During the 55th World Science Fiction Convention in 1997, held in San Antonio, Texas, Budrys and his wife Edna joined Tim Powers, Serena Powers, and Fiona Kelleghan in visiting the Alamo. Himself a refugee (a Lithuanian born in Königsberg, Germany, who as an infant moved with his family to the USA), Budrys expressed himself to be emotionally moved by the visit.
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His classic science fiction novel Rogue Moon (1960), a conceptual-breakthrough novel about an alien labyrinth on the Moon, was nominated for the 1961 Hugo Award, but lost to A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr..
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Published short fiction in magazines under the pseudonym "Alger Rome" while collaborating with Jerome Bixby.
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