James Gunn
(photo by Jason Dailey)
James Gunn has worked as an editor of paperback reprints; as managing editor of Kansas University alumni publications; as director of KU public relations; as a professor of English; and now is professor emeritus of English and director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. He won national awards for his work as an editor and a director of public relations. He was awarded the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in recognition of literary achievement and the Edward Grier Award for excellence in teaching, was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America for 1971–72 and president of the Science Fiction Research Association from 1980 to ’82, and has been guest of honor at many regional science fiction conventions, including SFeracon in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and Polcon, the Polish National SF convention, in Katowice. Gunn was presented with the Pilgrim Award of SFRA in 1976, a special award from the 1976 World SF Convention for Alternate Worlds, a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo) by the 1983 World SF Convention for Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, the Eaton Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement. SFWA’s Grand Master Award in 2007, and was a Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2013. He was a KU Mellon fellow in 1981 and 1984 and served from 1978 to ’80 and 1985 to present as chairman of the Campbell Award jury to select the best science fiction novel of the year. He has lectured in Denmark, China, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union for the US Information Agency.
Gunn is also the distinguished author of numerous science fiction novels and shorter works, including The Listeners, The Dreamers, The Witching Hour, The Joy Machine (with Theodore Sturgeon), Crisis!, The Burning, The Magicians, Station in Space, The Immortals (on which the 1969 TV movie and 1970–71 TV series The Immortal was based), and his current novel Transcendental. He also edited a series of science fiction anthologies intended for use in teaching courses on the subject, published as a six-volume work entitled The Road to Science Fiction.
The Synopsis Saga
When I started writing novels in 1952, the only way I knew to write a novel was to start at the beginning and work my way sequentially to the end. There was no point in writing a synopsis, since I had no prospect of getting a contract to write a novel until I had written it. After the first two, I started writing my novels as a series of novellas or novelettes, the way Isaac Asimov wrote The Foundation Trilogy, like tinker toys, each new one attached to the one that came before. Sometimes I would discuss work in progress with an editor on my annual visits to New York, and sometimes that would result in a contract before the work was finished. The only occasion on which that required a synopsis was when I submitted to Fred Pohl a couple of chapters of my novel-in-progress Kampus, when he was the science fiction editor at Bantam Books, and he told me he’d give me a contract for it, but he wanted a synopsis. “But you never wrote a synopsis,” I protested. “I just need it for the editorial committee,” he replied. “You don’t have to follow it.”
Later in my career as a novelist, however, I found other ways to write a novel. I wrote the final chapter of The Millennium Blues and then went back and wrote the preceding eighteen, and I did write a synopsis in hopes of getting a contract. That was when I had a reputation as a writer who had published more than a dozen novels. A few years later, when I felt as if I needed to spend my remaining writing time in greater assurance of publication, I began to seek contracts before the project was barely started, particularly for my non-fiction projects. Generally a brief summary of what I intended to accomplish was enough, as it was for the six-volume The Road to Science Fiction, The Science of Science-Fiction Writing, and Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (with Matthew Candelaria). But Reading Science Fiction (with Marleen Barr and Matthew Candelaria) took a full prospectus and table of contents.
When I started my most recent novel, Transcendental, I decided to seek a contract on the strength of a prospectus and the first and final chapters, but even a Grand Master award and forty-one previous books was not enough. Times had changed. Editors no longer had the ability to negotiate contracts without going through an editorial committee and getting the approval of the sales force and the accounting department. One editor said, “We can’t sell this kind of intelligent science fiction anymore.” I may have made the mistake of quoting T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer on the first page.…
Eventually, I submitted four chapters to Elizabeth Anne Hull’s Gateways, her tribute volume to her husband, Fred Pohl, and asked her to pick one. She said, “I want them all,” and when Tor Books editor Jim Frenkel went over the manuscript he wrote me that he’d like to see the novel when it was finished. That worked better than anything else—it’s always good to find an editor who wants to see a novel. And so—I really liked the synopsis that follows, and I’ve followed it pretty faithfully, including the sequel now in progress, but it took a complete manuscript and an editor who wanted it, to make it work.
—James Gunn
Transcendental
A Book Proposal
Transcendental will be a novel about a journey through a colorful world some thousand years in the future when humanity has colonized many planets in the galaxy and met a number of alien species with whom, after some difficulties in communication, it has learned to coexist in relative peace and harmony but at a price: limitation on innovation to prevent any species from gaining a dangerous advantage over the others and leading to a possible galactic competition or even outright warfare that, with planet-busting techniques, threaten the destruction of intelligent life in the galaxy. That stasis has been endangered, however, by the rise of a new religion that speculates about the discovery of an artifact on a remote planet, perhaps left by an ancient race. The artifact, the religion states, has the ability to enhance the mental and physical ability of any creature who submits itself to it, or to destroy if the creature is unfit or not a true believer. The religion, Transcendentalism, offers actual transcendence.
The novel will be about a kind of hajj by a group of pilgrims, as they make their way across a galaxy and then across a planet to reach the artifact. Modeled after The Canterbury Tales, the novel will offer a variety of characters and their individual stories focusing on the question and need for transcendence, as the protagonist, a skeptical adventurer, gets to know them and analyze their motives, including his own, through the personal conflicts that brought them to this dangerous journey and its problematic conclusion. The protagonist, the narrative slowly reveals, has been hired by a powerful organization—he does not know whether it is alien or human—to infiltrate the group and try to identify among its members the one who may be the prophet of Transcendentalism, the discoverer of the artifact who may already have undergone the transformation; and, if the process is real, to see that humanity acquires it ahead of other species. Transcendentalism and the possible Transcendentals that may result threaten the political equilibrium that has preserved the galaxy until now. Violence, romance, and death, from outside and inside the group, come as a inevitable accompaniment of their journey, and one revelation follows after another, all of it focused around the great SF theme of transcendence, as the protagonist is gradually transformed from a disillusioned skeptic into a believer in humanity and its quest for transcendence.
The novel ends as the protagonist reaches the goal and submits himself to the process he had originally scorned, but we do not learn whether he achieved transcendence or death. A sequel (Transubstantial?), or even a trilogy, is possible.
In addition to the theme of transcendence, the novel will deal with the theme of stasis versus change. The questions to be answered during the progress of the novel are: who hired the protagonist? who is the prophet? who (or what) doesn’t want the pilgrimage to reach its goal? The answers to these questions, and others, will undergo many transmutations as sides and motives are unveiled.
A parallel might be drawn to Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons upon his fellow man.”
***