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.
Rich Horton (by Francesca Myman)
As I write, distribution of two separate COVID-19 vaccines is in progress in the United States. A new President has been elected and will soon be inaugurated. And on a personal note, I have welcomed my first grandchild into the world. A time of optimism, right?
At the same time, COVID cases are at or near their highest rate of incidence in the US (and indeed, in many countries). The vaccine distribution is a hopeful sign but is going more slowly than we might wish. Though the new President was elected by a considerable margin, the outgoing President continues to dispute the election, going so far as to threaten a member of his own party, the Secretary of State of Georgia, with criminal charges if he can’t “find” enough votes to alter the result of the election in that state. On a personal note, the list of over 300,000 deaths from COVID in the US includes my aunt and a close personal friend at work. Surely this parallels numerous SFnal examp