“Nobody Bothers Gus”
First published in Astounding, November 1955 as by Paul Janvier

Algis Budrys was born on this date, January 9, in 1931. He passed away in 2008.

Budrys was was a prolific short story writer in the 1950’s, with many of his stories appearing in Astounding.  So this post is doing double duty as a birthday post and an Astounding/Analog 90th anniversary post.

Sadly most of his short stories are out of print. A quick perusal of the ISFDB reveals dozens of stories. Most have never been reprinted in one of his collections. A career retrospective is long overdue.

“Nobody Bothers Gus” is one of his stories that hasn’t been reprinted in one of his collections, although it has appeared in several anthologies.  It currently isn’t available in an electronic format but is in print in The Road to Science Fiction Vol. 4: From Here to Forever, edited by James Gunn. I first read it in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great Science Fiction Stories Vol. 17, (1955).

“Nobody Bothers Gus” is a quiet, thoughtful story about a lonely, aging man who happens to be a mutant. He has a unique psi power that makes people forget about him when they aren’t directly interacting with him.  He’s been trying to find others like him, but so far he’s only found one. He’s just gotten word that the home he was spent the last two years renovating is to be demolished to make a highway.

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. It’s slower and more low-key that what I tend to read these days, but it’s an excellent story.

Algis Budry was born Algirdas Janus Budrys in East Prussia.  He often went by “AJ”. Budrys wrote several novels that were well-received at their time of publication but have pretty much fallen into obscurity today, although most are available in ebook form.  In the early 1990’s Budrys was the editor of Tomorrow Science Fiction.  I still have at least one personal rejection letter from him.

He was one of the top judges of Writers of the Future.  I had the pleasure of meeting him several times at Conestoga in the 2000’s, where he was a regular attendee for several years.