March 11 is the birthday of three science fiction writers whose works I’ve enjoyed. They are F. M. Busby (1921-2005), Christopher Anvil (1925-2009), and Douglas Adams (1952-2001). Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

I’ve only read one book by F. M. Busby, but on the strength of that book, I’m going to read more.  That book was The Singularity Project. It was included in a crate of books left in my office when one of the faculty retired. This was the same faculty member who left a five and a half foot tall stack of crates containing forty years worth of science fiction magazines in my office that I nearly ran into when I showed up for work one morning. He had been storing them in  his lab and didn’t (or wasn’t allowed to) take them home. Thanks, Dave. I’m enjoying the heck out fo them.

The cover isn’t much to look at, but the old adage of don’t judge a book by its cover applies here. Here’s the basic plot.

Mitch Banning is a free lance engineer in the Seattle area who gets hired to work on a project by an old acquaintance. He and the acquaintance were never exactly friends. The acquaintance is rich and has been approached by a man representing a drug addicted scientist. He wants funds to build a matter transmitter. The representative is a con man who is supposedly reformed.

There are plot twists, assassins, and an uncertainty about whether the con artist is really reformed. The book is narrated by Mitch. He has a wonderfully hardboiled voice. This book was a pleasure to read. It is a standalone, that doesn’t tie into any of Busby’s series. Those are space opera to oen degree or another.

After reading this book, I read somewhere that Busby quit writiing because his sales were never good. That’s a shame if true. Sales aren’t always a reflection of quality. If The Singularity Project is any indication of his skill, the field lost an excellent writer. The blurbs on this book were from some top writers of the time, and I’ve read Heinlein was a fan o fhis work. That’s saying something. Add Busby to the informal list of writers whose work needs to be remembered.

Christopher Anvil is another writer who needs to be remembered. He is one of the few writers who has made me laugh out loud, and more than once.

The Anvil surname is actually a psuedonym. His real name was Harry Christopher Crosby. He began writing science fiction in the early 1950s, and soon adopted the Anvil pseudonym.

Anvil served in the military. That experience enabled him to portray the military aspects of his work in a realistic manner. His stories often involved poking fun at the military bureaucracy.

He soon found a sympathetic editor in John W. Campbell, Jr. His stories often appeared in Astounding and later Analog. Most of those stories involved humans overcoming alien adversaries, often possessing superior technology, by their innate intelligence.

Baen reprinted much of his work in eight volumes in the early years of this century.

And last, we come to the writer who is the most familiar to you, Douglas Adams.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels were quite popular at my high school, at least among the few of us who liked that kind of thing.

The series has become part of the popular culture, and that’s saying something. While Adams never succeeded in making me laugh out loud, he did provide me with many hours of amusement.

He followed this series up with the Drik Gently series. I’ve not read that one, but since there several entries in that series, I suspect it was at least close if not equal to the Hitchhiker books.