 James Gunn Read James' responses to our Dozen & 1 Questions. Read the transcript of James' special Chat from Tuesday, May 6th. |
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James Gunn was born in 1923 in Kansas City. After
three years in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he received his B.S.
in Journalism and his M.A. in English. He has worked as an editor of paperback
reprints, as managing editor of Kansas University (K.U.) alumni publications,
and as director of K.U. public relations, and as professor of English,
specializing in the teaching of fiction writing and science fiction, and
director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He is now emeritus
professor and has returned to full-time writing.
He has written plays, screenplays, radio scripts, articles, verse, and criticism, but most of his publications have been science fiction. He started writing SF in 1948, and was first published in Startling Stories as Edwin James, a pseudonym he dropped in 1950. He was a full-time freelance writer for four years and has had more than 90 stories published in magazines and books. He is the author of 23 books and the editor of eight. He has also published SF criticism, beginning with serialized excerpts from his MA thesis in Dynamic Science Fiction (1953-4) and continuing with The Discovery of the Future: The Ways Science Fiction Developed (1975) and Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982), which won a Hugo Award. Many of his articles and chapters have been collected in Inside Science Fiction (1992). Four of his stories were dramatized over NBC radio, one (The Cave of Night) was dramatized on television's Desilu Playhouse in 1959, and The Immortals was dramatized as an ABC-TV Movie of the Week in 1969 and became an hour-long series, The Immortal, in 1970. James Gunn has served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of
America for 1971-72 and president of the Science Fiction Research Association
from 1980-82, was guest of honor at many regional SF conventions, including
SFeracon in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and Polcon, the Polish National SF convention,
in Katowice. He served from 1978-80 and 1985- as chairman of the Campbell
Award jury to select the best science-fiction novel of the year. He has
lectured in Denmark, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Singapore,
Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union for the U.S. Information Agency. |
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