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In the dawning days of science fiction, there was a chasm between the concept-oriented authors and those who churned out space opera. John W. Campbell Jr. s Astounding Science Fiction, later renamed Analog to make the point clear, was the home of the brainy stuff. Bug-eyed monsters chased heroines in aluminum brassieres on the covers of Amazing, Imagination and Thrilling Wonder Stories. The first two Terminator movies, especially the second, belonged to Campbell s tradition of S-F ideas. They played elegantly with the paradoxes of time travel, in films where the action scenes were necessary to the convoluted plot. There was actual poignancy in the dilemma of John Connor, responsible for a world that did not even yet exist. The robot Terminator, reprogrammed by Connor, provided an opportunity to exploit Asimov s Three Laws of Robotics.
indeed, still is one of my heroes. While I didn’t meet him until 2002, when I first went to Lawrence for the Sturgeon Award ceremony, I already admired his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and had benefited greatly from his expansive, benevolent influence on science fiction as critic, anthologist, conference organizer and educator.
Sitting rapt in Jim’s KU office as he talked about the field he loved, I realized that my own mentor John Kessel had sat there just the same, as Jim’s student in the 1970s.
Kessel was my thesis director at North Carolina State University, and for years afterward, I passed to my own writing students the scores of aphorisms I learned from him. One day, when I did this in his presence, Kessel fidgeted and cleared his throat and confessed that he had stolen most of those aphorisms from Jim Gunn.