James Edwin Gunn
Star Bridge stands as the notable work most closely associated with James Edwin Gunn — a science fiction novel that anchors his reputation as a writer of the genre.
Gunn was born on July 12, 1923, in Kansas City. He pursued his education at the University of Kansas, where his formation as a scholar of English shaped the particular character of his career. That training gave him a double orientation: he worked as a novelist and science fiction writer, but also as a journalist, moving between the practical rhythms of periodical work and the sustained imaginative demands of long fiction. The scholarly and the creative were not opposed in his case but ran in parallel, each lending texture to the other.
As a novelist, Gunn wrote in English across the span of his career, producing work that bore the mark of both his literary education and his commitment to science fiction as a genre worthy of serious attention. His roles as writer, scholar of English, and journalist formed an interlocking set of occupations rather than a sequence of phases. The discipline of journalism kept his prose grounded, while his academic engagement with English gave his fiction a considered, deliberate quality. He remained a citizen of the United States throughout his life.
Gunn died on December 23, 2020, in Lawrence, nearly a century after his birth in Kansas City. The arc from that birth to that death enclosed a career devoted to science fiction in its multiple dimensions — as creative practice, as journalistic subject, and as a field of scholarly inquiry. Star Bridge remains the concrete work by which his output is most directly identified.
Quotes by James Edwin Gunn
The important task of government, you see, is to keep conditions stable, to hold down disturbances and unrest, to maintain itself, and the best way to do that is to give everybody the opportunity to do what they want – except change things.
Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself.
You have spent your life among scholarly men of good will. To you the universe is a benevolent place; it has treated you with kindness, or, at least, neutrality. I have seen passion and malice and greed, and I know that intelligence is not necessarily benevolent; in fact, in my experience, it is more likely to be merely an instrument in the persistent search for advantage, in weighing profit and loss and finding a means of maximizing profit and minimizing loss.
Being in that room was like being inside a computer, a modern Jonah inside a great fish not yet born, and he was relieved when it opened a mouth and spat them out into an office.
A man is what a man is; he recognises his deficiencies and tries to conquer them or plans around them.
The lies we tell about ourselves may be more revealing than the truths we incautiously reveal.