James Gunn, in addition to being a fine writer, was an editor and the founder of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction Center for the Study of Science Fiction - Wikipedia . He wrote many books about science fiction including “The Foundations of Science Fiction” about the works of Isaac Asimov
I just got the news myself. I had written a biography of him for a forthcoming book on Gnome Press, which published his first two novels, so I’m going to quote myself.
Gunn has become such a revered name in the field that it’s startling to look back and see how few books he has written over 70 years. He first broke through under his real name with a story in Galaxy in 1952, while working as an editor for Dell paperbacks. Instead of developing a science-fiction line for them, he got the itch to write sf for himself and freelanced industriously for a couple of years, building a reputation with the two Gnome novels and a number of short stories. “The Immortal,” a 1958 story, became the basis for the tv series The Immortal .
Gunn from the beginning specialized in the study of science fiction. He received a master’s from Northwestern in 1951; his thesis was serialized in Dynamic Science Fiction, probably a first for the field. The University of Kansas, his alma mater, brought him back first to manage alumni publications and then as a professor of English and journalism despite his lack of a Ph.D. In 1982, he became the Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. This led to the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year, and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Although he continued to occasionally write fiction, he is more famed for nonfiction studies that include such standards as Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and the teacher’s manual for his multi-volume anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. His work won him the Pilgrim Award, the Thomas D Clareson Award, and the J. Lloyd Eaton Memorial Award for lifetime achievement. He coined the term “the consensus future” for the technological world in which most classic sf and mid-20th century futurism is set and which I use as the lynchpin for all my research into future history.
The thing you can’t say in a formal biography is that Jim was one of the few true gentlemen in the field. You know the old cliche, I never heard anyone ever say a bad word about him? The number of people in sf of whom that’s true can’t be counted on the fingers of one hand. But Jim would be among them.
I liked a lot of his stuff. He would write a story set in the present day introducing one small thing, then extrapolate that forward into the future one short story at a time. For instance, the aforementioned “The Immortal” was but one story in a series eventually collected into one book.