James Gunn (1923-2020)

Author James Gunn, 97, died December 23, 2020. Gunn was a science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist.

James Edwin Gunn was born on July 12, 1923 in Kansas City MO. He earned two degrees from the University of Kansas, wrapped around three years of service in the US Navy in WWII and a year of freelance writing that produced nine stories. Published under the pseudonym Edwin James, they include his first two, ‘‘Paradox’’ and ‘‘Communications’’, which appeared in 1949 in Thrilling Wonder and Startling.

Gunn took a job with Western Printing in Racine WI, working on the Dell paperback line, before returning to freelancing following a fortuitous trip to the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago, where he met Mack Reynolds, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson, and his agent Frederik Pohl, among others.

‘‘The Misogynist’’, published in Galaxy in 1952, was the first story published under his own name and marked Gunn’s emergence as one of the top SF writers of the ’50s. Stories such as ‘‘Breaking Point’’ (1953) and ‘‘Wherever You May Be’’ (1953) are acknowledged classics. First novel This Fortress World (1955) was soon followed by well-known collaboration with Jack Williamson, Star Bridge (1955). Other important works were first published as story-sequences in the magazines, later taking shape as episodic novels: Station in Space (1958), The Joy Makers (1961), and The Immortals (1962). Some of Gunn’s standalone stories from the period were collected in Future Imperfect (1964). In 1959 Gunn stepped away from full-time writing and took an administrative position at the University of Kansas, which he would hold for a decade. In the late 1960s, he returned to writing with the sequence of stories that made up first-contact novel The Listeners (1972). Another story-sequence novel, The Burning (1972), and the satiric classic, Kampus (1977), also developed during this period. Gunn’s The Immortals was adapted into the television movie and subsequent television series, The Immortal, in 1969.

Gunn left university administration and began teaching science fiction at the University of Kansas in 1970, and he became the central figure in the burgeoning growth of science fiction studies in the 1970s. Gunn’s first academic project was the Literature of Science Fiction film series (1969-75), featuring talks by Forrest J Ackerman, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Damon Knight, and Frederik Pohl, and conversations with Gordon R. Dickson, Simak, and Williamson. Perhaps of most significance is the Lunch with John W. Campbell film, featuring Harry Harrison and Dickson having a story meeting with Campbell, filmed just a few months before Campbell’s death. Gunn’s genre history, Alternate Worlds, appeared in 1975, for which he won a special award at the 1976 Worldcon in Kansas City. That year, Gunn also received the Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association. During the 1970s he also served as president of both SFRA and SFWA.

Anthology series The Road to Science Fiction (1977-82, two additional volumes in 1998), brought a historical approach to science fiction into the classroom at both the college and high-school levels. Gunn’s book on Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982), was the first study of a major genre SF writer published by a prominent academic press and won a Hugo Award. Other non-fiction works include anthology The New Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1988), Inside Science Fiction (1992; revised 2006), The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (2000), Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (edited with Matthew Cande-laria, 2005), Reading Science Fiction (edited with Marleen S. Barr & Matthew Candelaria, 2008), and Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy (2013).

Gunn offered his first Intensive Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction in 1975 and started the Speculative Fiction Writers Workshop in 1985, both of which continue to be held every summer at the University of Kansas under the direction of Christopher McKitterick and Kij Johnson. Gunn founded the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas in 1982, which, among its many activities, administers the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award and, since 1987, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Gunn was named a SFWA grand Master in 2006, inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2016, and also received the Writing the Rockies Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Creative Writing from the Western Colorado State University. He continued to write fiction during his years as teacher and scholar. The Listeners stories appeared in book form in 1972, as did The Burning. The Magicians, an expansion of the 1954 story ‘‘Sine of the Magus’’, appeared in 1976; Kampus in 1977; The Dreamers in 1981; and Crisis! in 1986. Gunn’s hard-to-find attempt at a mainstream novel, The Millennium Blues (2000), is well worth tracking down. Another story-sequence novel, Gift from the Stars (2005), was written in response to Carl Sagan’s Contact, which in turn had been influenced by The Listeners. Gunn’s nonagenarian return to space opera with the Transcendental trilogy – Transcendental (2013), Transgalactic (2016), and Transformation (2017) – is a masterful wide-canvas narrative that encompasses Gunn’s lifelong thoughts on the genre.

Gunn kept writing until his final days, his most recent story sent on submission days before his death. He is survived by his son Kevin and his cat Annie.

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