Grand Master James Gunn, 97, died December 23, 2020. Gunn was one of the field’s true polymaths, excelling as an SF author, editor, and scholar. Gunn served as President of Science Fiction Writers of America in 1971-1972 and the organization honored him with a Damon Knight Grand Master Award in 2006. He was inducted into the SF Hall of Fame in 2015.
James Edwin Gunn was born July 12, 1923 in Kansas City MO. He attended the University of Kansas, where he earned a BA in journalism and a master’s in English, though his education was interrupted by three years serving in the US Navy during WWII. He briefly worked at Western Printing in Racine WI on the Dell paperback line. After attending the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago, where he met Mack Reynolds, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson, and his agent Frederik Pohl, among others, he began writing SF more seriously.
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YouTube channel to host it. At the link is his impressive list of sources.
I’ve spent several weekends working on a presentation of twentieth-century science fiction set in the year 2021, and here is the fruit of my labours, a 21-minute video.
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BEEP BEEP, BEEP BEEP. Phil Plait, in a “Bad Astronomy” entry at
…A standard radio astronomy technique to make sure that what you see is coming from the object you’re observing is to move the telescope back and forth a bit to point to a different part of the sky and see if the signal persists (perhaps leaking into the dish from a source nearby); this is called “nodding” because it’s like a head nodding. When they did this, the signal went away, then came back when they repointed at Proxima.