The novel “Hard Landing” by Algis Budrys was published for the first time in the magazine “Fantasy & Science Fiction” between October and November 1992 and as a book in 1993.
In the late ’40s an alien spaceship crashes on Earth. The four crew survivors destroy equipment and weapons and then split up and flee. They try to build for themselves a life on Earth facing their situation in different ways.
To minimize the risks of getting caught they’re not supposed to meet ever again but sometimes the desire to see someone of their own species is too strong. Their occasional meetings don’t always end well.
“Hard Landing” is the last novel written by Algis Budrys, about fifteen years after the previous one. Over the years the author had done various jobs in the publishing field as a critic, editor, teacher in a writing course, organizer and juror at the “Writers of the Future” prize. As a writer he published most of his novels in the ’50s and early ’60s, then his other activities took over almost all his time.
“Hard Landing” was therefore an event in some ways but by the standards of the ’90s it’s a rather short novel, being less than two hundred pages long. The content however is pure Algis Budrys.
“Hard Landing” is written in the form of an investigation. The lives of the four aliens on Earth is reconstructed through direct and indirect witnesses. The important thing is that it tries to understand the point of view of aliens who are wrecked on a planet that is primitive in their eyes and have to survive somehow.
As always Algis Budrys leads us into the exploration of the characters’ thoughts and motivations also developing the problem of identity. The shipwrecked aliens in fact have to essentially erase their identities to make up local ones. Speaking of alienation looks like a pun however they’re forced to live in a foreign land so that’s their actual feeling.
Each of the aliens reacts differently to the wreck building a new life for themselves not so much based on their skills, often useless on Earth, but depending on where they arrive after fleeing their wrecked ship. One of them breaks all their laws revealing himself to U.S.A. authorities and makes a deal with a politician selling him the alien technologies he knows enough to lead to their recreation on Earth.
Thus there’s someone who knows the existence of aliens and in “Hard Landing” it’s clear that there’s someone in the U.S.A. who wants to keep the secret. Some UFO sightings actually concern alien spacecrafts but around them a fog of disinformation is created. When an alien dies and the autopsy reveals the many physiological abnormalities, a federal agency whose budget comes from who knows where is immediately informed.
The part about the cover up of the sightings and contacts with the aliens is not thorough: Algis Budrys deliberately leaves a lot of ambiguity because the person who carried out the investigation on the shipwrecked aliens had access only to some information. For the record, “Hard Landing” was published before the start of the TV series “The X-Files”.
The narrative is inevitably fragmented among the points of view of the aliens and the person who carries out the investigation on them. Thus at the beginning “Hard Landing” is a bit difficult to read but it gets easier because it’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle where you start to see the big picture after placing some pieces.
It’s a shame that Algis Budrys wrote such a small number of novels but at least their quality remained high. “Hard Landing” is an excellent swan song for this author so I recommend reading it.
