James E. Gunn, as editor, critic, and teacher, has done much to introduce science fiction and make it accessible to uninitiated readers. Ultimately, Gunn will prove more important as a commentator on science fiction--as the popularizer of an already popular form within the world of the academy--than as an original contributor to the genre. Ironically, Gunn's own science fiction is seldom innovative and almost always betrays the weaknesses, as well as displays the strengths, of traditional science fiction.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, James Edwin Gunn grew up with the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s while pursuing a formal education in literature. He received a B.S. in journalism from the University of Kansas in 1947, spent the next year studying theater at Northwestern, returned to Kansas to do graduate work in English literature and completed his M.A. in 1951. His master's thesis was a study of...