In a little over twenty-five years, A. J. Budrys has produced eight novels, over one hundred short stories under eight known pen names (including "Algis"), and three collections of selected stories. He has been praised by Poul Anderson as "one of our best" science-fiction authors, even though, oddly enough, he has never been honored with either the Hugo or Nebula award. Budrys's major work is characterized by an international flavor, the result of the author's European background. The son of Jonas and Regina Kashuba Budrys, he was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in a time that was to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, a man whom Budrys was later to call the "great maniac." Budrys's family fled Nazism, and the young man spent the war years in what was supposed to be temporary exile. His father was the United States representative of the Lithuanian government-in-exile...