"I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style." -- James Gunn
James Edwin Gunn (born 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American science fiction author, editor, scholar, and anthologist. His work from the 1960s and 70s is considered his most significant fiction, and his Road to Science Fiction collections are considered his most important scholarly books. He won a Hugo Award for a non-fiction book in 1983 for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. He has been named the 2007 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
"I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.""I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.""I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.""In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.""It also is true that some ideas naturally work themselves out over a longer period of time than a single human life can encompass.""One should be willing to throw away a dozen ideas to come up with a good one, just as one should throw away a dozen words to come up with the right one.""That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them."
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, after which he attended the University of Kansas, earning a Bachelor of Science in Journalism in 1947 and a Masters of Arts in English in 1951. Gunn went on to become a faculty member of the University of Kansas, where he served as the university's director of public relations and as a professor of English, specializing in science fiction and fiction writing. He is now a professor emeritus and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, which awards the annual John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award at the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, every July.
He served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1971—72 and was President of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980-82. SFWA honored him as a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2007.
Gunn began his career as a science fiction author in 1948. He has had almost 100 stories published in magazines and anthologies and has authored 26 books and edited 10. Many of his stories and books have been reprinted around the world.
In 1996, Gunn wrote a novelization of the unproduced Star Trek episode "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon.
His stories also have been adapted into radioplays and teleplays:
NBC radio's X Minus One
Desilu Playhouse's 1959 "Man in Orbit", based on Gunn's "The Cave of Night"
ABC-TV's Movie of the Week "The Immortal" (1969) and an hour-long television series in 1970, based on Gunn's The Immortals
An episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1989 and entitled "Psychodynamics of the Witchcraft" was based on James Gunn's 1953 story "Wherever You May Be".
James E. Gunn (2004) The Listeners, BenBella Books, ISBN 1-932100-12-1 (Carl Sagan stated about The Listeners: "One of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written.")
