Multiple award winning author James Gunn continues to produce new stories at the age of 93 – his recent novel Transformation has just been published by Tor. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas and the founding director of the university’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction. To mark Transformation’s release, he answered questions from Paul Simpson…

Transformation brings your latest series to a close – would you like to tell more full length stories in that world to go alongside the “Tales” you’re currently writing?

I’ve thought about it and a few ideas have come to mind. Right now, though, I’m completing work on a couple of books: my memoir, Star-Begotten, which is scheduled for fall publication by McFarland, and Alternate Worlds, an updated edition of my 1975 illustrated history of science fiction.

Do you derive as much pleasure from telling a story now as you did when you started?

Probably more, since I have a better understanding of what I’m doing and a better appreciation for what it means to do it well – not that I always succeed. When you’re young, everything seems natural and easy; with experience you learn how complicated storytelling is and you become more self-critical. That slows down the creative process while it enhances the final product and your appreciation of achieving something closer to the original inspiration. Raymond Chandler once wrote that “everything you learn about writing takes away from your need to do it.” I’d amend that to say that it makes writing more difficult but the final product more artful.

This trilogy feels like a return to grand space opera – something that you penned early in your career. What brought you back to this side of the genre? And how has it felt different this time around?

Age is a period of summing up (that’s why I wrote a memoir) and coming to an understanding, if possible, about what it all means and what has any importance. One of the values I identified was humanity, that is, what do we leave behind and what can we suggest about solving some of the problems that the human species has yet to solve. One of the definitions I’ve used for science fiction is that it is “the literature of the human species.” Its stories are about all of us, not isolated individuals. The space opera allows us to think about that by raising major issues and showing how they work out, especially if you can compare humanity with aliens who evolved under different conditions. So I came back to the space opera as a tribute to the traditions of science fiction (in fact, individual tributes are buried within the narratives of all three novels) and a consideration of what I have learned about humanity. The Transcendental Machine, for instance, addresses a couple of these: it is an example of the basic science-fiction concern with the unanticipated consequence and the way toward a better species – we just need to get rid of the imperfections that keep us from thinking clearly and responding effectively to be not super-human but more perfectly human.

None of this would have occurred to me 60 years ago when I was writing This Fortress World and Star Bridge (with Jack Williamson) – so the books benefit from 60 years of experience (and maybe suffer from a loss of youthful exuberance).

Your stories often appeal to all the senses – we get a sense of how places smell and sound; is this something you consciously bring to the fore, or is it simply an innate part of how you envisage and write a scene?

Actually, it is something I learned from a writers workshop I took in the 1960s from Caroline Gordon, one of the Southern emigres and a visiting lecturer at the University of Kansas one semester. She provided my first experience with the concept of fiction as an art form and during a series of evening lectures she described the major authors who had contributed to its development. One of them was Gustave Flaubert (best know for Madame Bovary), who originated the theory that nothing exists in fiction unless it is happens in a real place, and the way to make a place real is to describe it with an appeal to at least three senses, That clicked with me, since we don’t experience anything in real life without its impact on all our senses, so I began to apply it to my stories (the first of these, if anyone wants to check, was “Powder Keg” in Station in Space), and I have tried to stick to that principle ever since. It fell into place with my desire to make the unusual circumstances of science fiction as believable as possible by paying attention to the everyday details. Science fiction, it seems to me, operates on two principles: familiarizing the strange or estranging the familiar.

Science fiction has changed over the decades you’ve been writing, often as events in the real world have caught up with the predictions within the stories. What do you feel are the most important things that have changed in that time?

The expansion of the book market, both in numbers and in financial return, has made it possible for many more people to devote more time to writing, and so the genre has become far more diverse in theme and authorship. That’s good for the field in lots of ways, but it also means a loss of unity, of togetherness. When I was getting into the field (and particularly after I attend my first convention, the World SF Convention of 1952), everybody knew everybody else and everybody had read the same books and magazines (because there weren’t many of them), and they could talk about them knowledgeably There was only one fandom. Now there are nearly 3,000 books published every year, and nobody can read even a small percentage of them, even all of the works nominated for various awards. And there are half a dozen other fandoms, with the largest convention being the Comic-con, which is largely devoted to comic books and media. And science fiction has become a medium accepted by society in general through all of its expansion. So all of that is good, but I miss the feeling of great ideas exciting a small band of brothers, the Golden Age of Astounding and even the later Golden Age when the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction entered the field in 1950, and, as I look back upon it, the Golden Age of the science-fiction novel in the early 1950s when Mission of Gravity, Childhood’s End, The Space Merchants, The Demolished Man, The Caves of Steel, The Puppet Masters, and other novels were breaking new ground.

So, it seems to me that the writing has gotten better but the excitement and the splendor of innovation may be missing.

Do you feel that there are any topics that science fiction couldn’t or shouldn’t tackle?

No.

You penned a Star Trek novel some years back; are there any other fictional universes (literary or screen) that you’d like a chance to “play” in?

I wrote two tie-in novels under special circumstances, a novelization of The Immortal (based on my own novel The Immortals) because Bantam Books couldn’t find anybody else to do it, and the novelization of Ted Sturgeon’s proposal for a Star Trek episode that was never made because of my respect for Ted and his heirs, and the project was brought to me by a former student. My head may be too filled with my own ideas to want to spend my time in other fictional universes, and I’ve always told my writing students that the only thing worth writing is what only they can write.

On a practical level, how has your writing process changed over the years? Have you embraced new technology as it’s become available, or do you prefer to work with tried and trusted methods?

I’ve graduated to new technology as it has become available, from a used portable typewriter (a Smith-Corona) to a standard model (an L.C. Smith), to a Selectric, and finally to a series of computers, and they all have provided greater access to writing possibilities, to lessening the gap between the mind and the words on the page. I’ve even changed word-processing programs, some of them only because some no longer were available. But I must admit, finally, that I’d like things to settle down.

As far as the writing itself, I’ve found that age may bring wisdom, but it also brings a loss of energy and imagination. So I try to make up for that by writing more wisely and devices to help make better use of time and effort. For instance, in writing Transgalactic and Transformation, I started outlining on a single sheet the scenes I was going to write as I approached each new chapter, so that the time actually spent on writing could be devoted to writing it well rather than thinking about what should happen next.

Thanks to Rick Hellman for his help in arranging this interview.

Transformation is available now from Tor