Hard Landing by Algis Budrys

Some books you want to read again to see if they're as good as you remembered them.

The TL; DR here: yes. And even sneakier and smarter than 1993-era Andy may have realized, or remembered.

Hard Landing was the last of Algis Budry's nine novels, appearing when he was in his early sixties. He was never prolific: most of those novels came in the '50s, and his previous book, Michaelmas, was sixteen years before Landing. Landing is also quite short: the original edition - I bought it for the SFBC - was less than two hundred pages, and in the current SF Gateway Omnibus edition, it's barely a hundred. I didn't count words, but my guess is that it just clears the novel bar at forty or forty-five thousand words.

To be clear: we don't judge books by weight, but by what they achieve.

Hard Landing is a secret history disguised as a SF novel disguised as a document dump, a series of individual statements and conversations and reports covering about twenty-five years, ending in the mid-1970s. There is a major SF element, which I will spoil in another paragraph or two - and which was somewhat spoiled by the original cover, though kept quiet in the descriptive copy, then and now - so anyone who wants to remain unspoiled should stop reading here, go back to the TL; DR, and get a copy of Hard Landing for themselves.

It opens with a body found on the tracks of a CTA train station in Chicagoland, electrocuted by the third rail. It is the early 1970s; Budrys does not go out of the way to tell us this, but we can deduce it. That body has certain unusual features, which attracts the interest of a specialized government organization.

We do not follow the investigations of that organization. The last section makes clear that we are reading documents assembled by "A.B.," someone who lived in the area and became interested after somewhat later events. A.B. is clear that there are some things in the documents he could not possibly have known.

Here's the spoiler: an interstellar spacecraft, a scoutship from a more advanced civilization, crashed in the swamps of New Jersey's Pine Barrens in about 1950, with a crew of five. The five aliens are superficially human - more than superficially, to a 99.9% degree, frankly, which the reader will take as this novel's premise and not question it - and so they are able to scuttle their ship in a bog, and set off, separately, to live the rest of their lives quietly as human men.

The narrative mostly follows one of them, the navigator, who goes as Jack Mullica as a human. We do learn what happened to the other four, and especially the captain. We do learn all of their fates.

Along the way, we figure out the captain's plans, and the connections he made in those twenty-five years. And we come to see a government functionary code-named Yankee, a man who nearly every American reader will be able to connect with a real name.

Budrys tells this, as I said, through a series of documents - some official, some personal, in the voices of bureaucrats and these alien men and others and, occasionally, in his own voice as the investigator piecing it all together. He plays fair with the reader at all times, but never holds the reader's hand - this is the kind of book that implies more than it says, and hints at things it doesn't want to even imply.

It is a secret history. Hard Landing provides new, fictional, explanations for things that really happened. It does so slyly, almost casually, laying out its cards in full view but not ostentatiously pointing out what they add up to. It is a smart, quick, pointed SF novel, precisely written and carefully told. It is a shame Budrys didn't write more, but it is a joy to rediscover how good he was.