Professor Gunn

alien female: see this page

Listening in the Ekcolir Reality

 It was a professor of English who first introduced me to my favorite author (Jack Vance) so you might think I would be more appreciative of James E. Gunn (1923-2020). However, I often struggle to appreciate science fantasy stories that are written by authors who never learned much science. Using that as my excuse, I've pretty much avoided the writings of Gunn. However, since he was born 100 years ago, I decided that I should investigate some examples of Grand Master Gunn's Sci Fi story telling.

Searching for Space Aliens. One of my favorite science fiction movies is Contact. A great concept: humans develop a technology that allows us to detect signals from other creatures who exist on distant exoplanets. In the September 1968 issue of Galaxy magazine was "The Listeners" by Gunn. Astronomer Carl Sagan is cited as a SETI authority on page two of Gunn's story. Gunn set his story 60 (counting from 1968) years in his future, 60 years into a series of failed attempts to make contact with intelligent space aliens.  

Stepford Kansas (Figure 1)

 Failure. And here we are, 55 years later and still no alien contact. "The Listeners" is more of a soap opera than a science fiction story. Rather than provide readers with an imagined tale of first contact, we get the suicide attempt of the wife of a SETI scientist. 😞 I suppose Gunn might have imagined that there is very little chance of picking up alien signals. If so, then the most interesting thing that can come out of SETI might be an answer to this question: how long will people persist in listening for aliens if no message is ever received? What keeps scientists at work on long-duration projects is their ability to imagine interesting outcomes for their efforts. Thus, Sagan, a scientist, wrote into his SETI story a scenario of first contact. 

After "The Listeners" was first published in 1968, Gunn expanded the story. I have only read the last two pages of the full novel version of The Listeners from 1972 in which Gunn did imagine receiving an alien message from a dead (😖) extraterrestrial species.

Future Imperfect (see also)
In the Ekcolir Reality

 Neosho's Choicest. In the June 1958 issue of Fantastic was an alien invasion story by Gunn. I guess Gunn's preferred title for this story was "The Girls Who Were Really Built". Gunn imagined aliens who could construct artificial women and provide each man on Earth with a cute lover. Figure 1 shows the interior art for "Neosho's Choicest". Those artificial women did not ever have any children. The alien plan for taking control of Earth: end human reproduction and allow the human species to quietly die off. 

No Spoilers. You'll have to read  "Neosho's Choicest" to find out if the aliens are successful. Maybe in an alternate Reality, Gunn's story could have become long-running 1960's television series, with each weekly episode featuring a new alien-designed artificial woman arriving in the small town of Neosho Kansas.

Figure 2. Can the Babe score?

 Little Orphan Android. Last year I blogged about old Sci Fi stories featuring baseball as a plot element. In the September 1955 issue of Galaxy the lead story was "Little Orphan Android" by James E. Gunn which starts with the paragraph shown in Figure 2. Yes, this is Gunn's imagined version of Earth where androids golf, box and play baseball, simply to provide entertainment for humans. 

I'm a sucker for stories about robots, so how did Gunn deploy an army of robots on Earth?

Figure 3. Boyd is entertained by androids.

In Gunn's imagined future, robots can do everything better than humans can, so humans have grown lazy; they sit around all day watching television, drinking and taking drugs (Figure 3). In writing "Little Orphan Android", Gunn essentially created a follow-on story for "With Folded Hands", a Jack Williamson story from 1947. Gunn explicitly acknowledge the link between "Little Orphan Android" and "With Folded Hands".

Lucy

 Supply and Demand. Gunn set his story in 1947 and depicted a world where robots have a problem with lazy humans. The problem: humans are not reliable consumers. So now the robots have begun making a new model of android that will more reliably consume waste resources than human do. The 13th of this new consumer model of androids is the titular "orphan android" who arrives in Boyd's life and immediately starts breaking everything in Boyd's apartment and eating vast amounts of food. Is this the end of Humanity? The plot of the story: will humans now be completely replaced by androids?

 Not if Lucy can help it. Near the start of "Little Orphan Android", Gunn introduces readers to Lucy. Lucy is the shapely redhead who lives next door to Boyd. However, Boyd has no memory of having ever seen Lucy before. Lucy is a psychologist who has the ability to hypnotize people and scramble their memories. Lucy is on a mission to defeat the robots and put humans back in charge of the planet.

"Little Orphan Android" attempts to depict a way for Humanity to be liberated from their well-meaning but misguided robots. 

SOE what?

 SOE What? Rather than have robopsychologist Susan Calvin fix what is wrong with a wayward positronic robot, Gunn depicts Lucy as a psychologist who has to save Humanity by manipulating the minds and behavior of people like Boyd.

Gunn even "borrowed" Asimov's idea that robots are programmed with three laws that govern their behavior. Gunn's three laws are that robots must provide Service, Obedience and Efficiency (S.O.E.).

Odd Ending. Sadly, it seems like part of "Little Orphan Android" got cut by the magazine editor. There is a mysterious character in the story named Greer who seems to show up at the end of this story in a way that makes no sense and the thread of the plot just sort of falls apart and readers are left to ask, "SOE what?" Maybe Gunn wrote a sequel depicting the fates of Lucy and Boyd.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
cover art by François Allot

Here is what TPI had to say about "Little Orphan Android": "It's a pretty stupid story with some pretty contrived plot points... overlong..."

 Lucy and Greer and apparently other humans are now working to get back into a position where they can gain control over the robots who are running Earth. Boyd is their latest recruit and he is wanted by the rebels because he is creative. Before the robot police caught him, he had modified some androids so that they would work for him, making hand-crafted items that could be sold for ca$h.

I'm not quite as dismissive of "Little Orphan Android" as is TPI, however I have to wonder if the story was repeatedly rejected by other magazines before finally being accepted for publication in Galaxy. I imagine that shortly after Gunn read "With Folded Hands", and unwilling to let the robots win, he sat down and pounded out "Little Orphan Android". This "humans vs robot" story did not turn out great, but it is not as bad as TPI suggests. 

the science of writing

Here is a great quote from Jack Vance: "the dissection of a butterfly, a spectroscope turned to the sunset, the psychoanalysis of a laughing girl". This is in the context of other such statements from Vance including, "when erudition comes in, poetry departs". Look at this tribute page praising Gunn as a professor of science fiction. Somehow, Gunn's science fiction stories seem to me like a spectroscope turned to the sunset or a misguided academic dissection of common science fiction themes.

 Really. Gunn wrote a book called The Science of Science-Fiction Writing which I have not read. The idea's provoked by that title make me think of an analytic process that would threaten to take all the fun out of science fiction. I have read Gunn's book Isaac Asimov which is part of a series called The Foundations of Science Fiction in which Gunn turns his spectroscope of literary analysis on Asimov's fiction, including the Foundation Trilogy and Asimov's robot stories.

cover art by Alex Schomburg

 Too Long, Did Not Read. Gunn provided a useful service to Asimov fans by reading and summarizing the vast amount of autobiographical information that Asimov published about himself, saving lazy people like me from having to read it all. 

In his analysis the Foundation Trilogy, Gunn seeks to explain its popularity with science fiction fans. Gunn first provides a plot summary of the Foundation Trilogy then discusses the fictional science of Psychohistory which is the science fictional "glue" holding the Trilogy together.

Gunn quotes from John Campbell's 1947 essay "The Science of Science Fiction Writing" in which Campbell stated the general idea that interesting science fiction stories can be crafted by imagining ways that disciplines such as sociology, psychology and parapsychology might develop into branches of science.

image source

 Cross-Over. Asimov transferred concepts from the statistical mechanics of chemistry to the imaginary science of Psychohistory. Asimov was probably the only science fiction writer of the 1940 who had ever studied physical chemistry, so nobody else could have even begun to do what Asimov did in his Foundation Trilogy. In his analysis of what makes the Foundation Trilogy so popular, Gunn seems to miss this key point. Instead, Gunn proceeds to offer a pop-psychology analysis of Asimov as a means of constructing his literary analysis of Asimov's writing, an approach which I find both fanciful and distasteful. 👅

With his background as a science student, Asimov was able to invent an imaginary science (Psychohistory) which entertained millions of science fiction fans. Gunn was inspired to try to elucidate a "science of science fiction" story telling, but given his lack of understanding of science, how could he do more than provide a literary critique of the science fiction genre?

das robots (the movie)

 The Robots. In chapter 3 of his book about Asimov, Gunn turned to analysis of Asimov's many robot stories. Unfortunately for Gunn, his book was written without knowledge of the additional Foundation and robot novels that Asimov was yet to publish (in the 1980s and 1990s). Gunn refers to the 1976 story "The Bicentennial Man" as the "fitting conclusion" to Asimov's then existing corpus of about 30 robot stories. Gunn's analysis of Asimov's positronic robot stories is centered on the three robot story collections The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories, I, Robot  and The Rest of the Robots.

Gunn states that despite the title I, Robot (which was imposed on Asimov by an editor), Asimov never wrote a first-person robot story (written from the perspective of a robot). Asimov may have taken that observation as a challenge. Asimov's last robot story was "Cal", which was written from the perspective of an unusual robot who wanted to be a story writer.

from Gunn's book, Isaac Asimov

In discussing the stories in I, Robot, Gunn also mentions "With Folded Hands" (see above, on this page, Gunn's robot story "Little Orphan Android"). Gunn suggests that "The Evitable Conflict" was written as Asimov's reaction to "With Folded Hands".

a (Wo)Man vs a naked Machine

 Clueless. In his critique of Asimov's literary style, Gunn apparently fails to realize that clear and unadorned writing is the standard style used in scientific publications. Asimov, as a trained scientist, often wrote in the way that he was trained to write as a scientist. Many science fiction fans don't need the literary frills that animate otherwise meaningless conventional fiction stories. The puzzle stories that Asimov wrote about malfunctioning robots (and the solutions to those puzzles) are enough for science fiction fans even if Asimov's characters are "cardboard" and Asimov does not bother to paint much of the surrounding scenery (Asimov used "a bare stage"). 

clothes make the man robot

While seeking to explain the popularity of Asimov's stories, Gunn, wearing his literary criticism hat, criticizes Asimov's stories from the perspective of people who think that conventional fiction is superior to science fiction. I find this approach to Asimov's fiction both misguided and silly. If someone like Gunn truly wants to explain why science fiction fans enjoy Asimov's stories then Gunn must understand science fiction fans, not repeat the complaints that always come from non-science fiction readers who don't "get science fiction". Asimov's popularity among science fiction fans seems to remain a mystery to Gunn even after his extensive analysis of the situation. I'm not impressed by the resolving power of Gunn's literary spectroscope. 🤷

image source

 Stories Collected By The Master. Back in the 1970s when I was in my personal golden age of discovering science fiction, the first story written by Gunn that I read was "The Cave of Night". That story was originally published in the February 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, but I read it as collected in the anthology "Where Do We Go from Here?" 

 Fake News. In Gunn's story, the first man sent into outer space by rocketry becomes lost in space, unable to return home. The entire world rallies together in an effort to rescue the stranded astronaut. The only problem is, the entire "man lost in space" story is faked. It is only now, 50 years later, that I just learned "The Cave of Night" was the first of a series of stories in what the ISFDB calls "Station in Space Universe". Reading "The Cave of Night" again after 50 years, I can report that I could still remember reading some of the lines from the story as a boy.

cover art by Ed Emshwiller

"The Cave of Night" is fantasy from the pre-Space Age. In reality, space flight was made possible through well-funded government projects. However, many pre-Space Age science fiction story writers either depicted space pioneers as building space ships in their garage or devising some low-budget scam that was designed to attract the needed fund$ for $paceflight. 💰 None of those old stories ever resonated with me, since I read them after having lived through the reality of NASA and the Apollo program.

alien abduction

 Telepathy, too. Before departing from my investigation of Gunn, I'll mention one of his first published science fiction stories, "Paradox" which was published in the October 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. According to Gunn, when that story was accepted for publication, it changed his life. The story is highly contrived but it contains the idea that telepathic aliens might be driven insane by contact with humans. Why so? Because humans can believe two contradictory things at the same time. I don't find the story convincing and its depiction of a burglar walking into a spaceship launch facility and taking off with the rocket to go visit aliens is absurd, not to mention the ending of the story where a thief who stole a spaceship, upon returning to Earth, is treated like a hero by government officials.

Related Social Media: #VintageSciFiMonth 

Related Reading: "A Matter of Ethics" by R. R. Winterbotham (1955)

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New science fiction in 2023: Echo of Cynym.
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