Picture of author.

James Gunn (1) (1923–2020)

Teoksen The Joy Machine tekijä

Katso täsmennyssivulta muut tekijät, joiden nimi on James Gunn.

James Gunn (1) has been aliased into James E. Gunn.

85+ teosta 2,778 jäsentä 50 arvostelua 2 Favorited

Tietoja tekijästä

Image credit: James Edwin Gunn, SF author,
at the 2006 Nebula Awards
held in New York City, 2007
Copyright © 2007 Ron Hogan

Sarjat

Tekijän teokset

Works have been aliased into James E. Gunn.

The Joy Machine (1996) 302 kappaletta
The Immortals (1962) 227 kappaletta
The Joy Makers (1961) 166 kappaletta
Transcendental (2013) 154 kappaletta
The Magicians (1976) 113 kappaletta
Nebula Award Stories 10 (1975) 107 kappaletta
This Fortress World (1955) 89 kappaletta
Future Imperfect (1964) 85 kappaletta
Mind Master (1980) 65 kappaletta
Crisis! (1986) 65 kappaletta
Transgalactic: A novel (2016) 48 kappaletta
Gift from the Stars (2005) 26 kappaletta
Reading Science Fiction (2008) 18 kappaletta
Inside Science Fiction (1992) 13 kappaletta
Von Ellison bis Haldeman (1991) 11 kappaletta
Von Huxley bis Heinlein (1988) 10 kappaletta
Von Malzberg bis Benford (1982) 9 kappaletta
Von Wells bis Stapledon (1988) 9 kappaletta
Von Ballard bis Stableford (2001) 8 kappaletta
Von Clement bis Dick (1990) 8 kappaletta
Von Gilgamesch bis Hawthorne (1998) 7 kappaletta
Von Matheson bis Shaw (1992) 6 kappaletta
Die Venus-Fabrik (1964) 6 kappaletta
Von Heinlein bis Farmer (1998) 5 kappaletta
Von Lem bis Varley (1993) 4 kappaletta
THE UNPUBLISHED GUNN Part One (1992) 2 kappaletta
Tendre femelle (1950) 1 kappale
New Blood [novelette] (1955) 1 kappale
Donor [novelette] (1960) 1 kappale
Quantum Theory 1 kappale
Skin Game 1 kappale
In Our Stars 1 kappale
Singular Days 1 kappale
The Last Word 1 kappale
Witch Hunt 1 kappale
Patterns 1 kappale
Trial By Fire 1 kappale
Survival Policy 1 kappale
Elixir 1 kappale

Associated Works

Works have been aliased into James E. Gunn.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) — Esipuhe, eräät painokset25,722 kappaletta
Maailmojen sota (1897) — Jälkisanat, eräät painokset18,214 kappaletta
The Foundation Trilogy (1951) — Esipuhe, eräät painokset6,533 kappaletta
Brightness Reef (1995) — Johdanto, eräät painokset2,487 kappaletta
Dreamfall (1996) — Johdanto, eräät painokset612 kappaletta
Illegal Alien (1997) — Johdanto, eräät painokset518 kappaletta
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories (1993) — Avustaja — 441 kappaletta
Transition (1991) — Johdanto, eräät painokset384 kappaletta
The Day The Martians Came (1988) — Johdanto, eräät painokset274 kappaletta
100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories (1984) — Avustaja — 246 kappaletta
Wizards' Worlds (1989) — Johdanto, eräät painokset225 kappaletta
Microcosmic Tales (1944) — Avustaja — 143 kappaletta
Isaac Asimov: Science Fiction Masterpieces (1986) — Avustaja — 101 kappaletta
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow: A Discursive Symposium (1974) — Avustaja — 91 kappaletta
Nebula Awards Showcase 2008 (2008) — Avustaja — 90 kappaletta
SF: Authors' Choice 4 (1974) — Avustaja — 84 kappaletta
Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World (2017) — Johdanto — 35 kappaletta
The Cherryh Odyssey (2004) — Johdanto — 33 kappaletta
Mission: Tomorrow (2015) — Avustaja — 21 kappaletta
Synergy: New Science Fiction, Vol. 4 (1989) — Tekijä — 20 kappaletta
Alfa Vier: SF-Verhalen (1976) 12 kappaletta
Golden Age SF: Tales of a Bygone Future (2006) — Avustaja — 10 kappaletta
Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 38, No. 9 [September 2014] (2014) — Avustaja — 10 kappaletta
Destination: Future (2010) — Avustaja — 7 kappaletta

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

The Empire may still exist, at least it does on the fortress orbiting the planet, where the bulk ofthe population toils to preserve the privileges of the few administrators. Cracks are appearing in the administration, and we are left with a few rebels who are working to overthrow the system. I read this paperback in 1963, though it was published in 1951.
 
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DinadansFriend | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 3, 2024 |
I think I'll be an outlier on this book.

The backdrop was interesting, the characters varied and extreme, the plot interesting, and yet it didn't hang together for me at all.

The intro drew me in, then the book just stumbled along for many many pages, and when it finally got interesting, it ended.
 
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furicle | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 5, 2023 |
The book was described by some as a traveler's tale - a Canterbury Tales sort of thing with aliens. That was what caught my fancy as well as the fact I had never read one of James Gunn's novels (except maybe The Listeners). I had rather low expectations and the book happily exceeded them. It starts a thousand years in the future with a group of assorted aliens just after a peace has been established after a galactic war. We begin at the edge of known space and head off to the unknown with pilgrims, and others, and they seem to be seeking transcendence. This is also an entertaining mystery in space, kind of a locked room, or spaceship...

I really enjoyed the journey and it was a quick and easy read. The ending is clever and leaves the reader with a sort of cliffhanger. Almost 4 stars
… (lisätietoja)
½
 
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RBeffa | 10 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jul 12, 2023 |
review of
James Gunn's The Mind Master
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15, 2015

There's definitely variety in Gunn's themes: This Fortress World ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6011288-this-fortress-world ) is different from Station in Space is different from The Listeners ( rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028305.The_Listeners ) is different from The Magicians ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians ).

However, The Mind Master is similar in some respects to The Joy Makers & also to Kampus ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144066.Kampus ). I get the impression that Gunn, as a university professor, has had a somewhat pessimistic vision of the future based on what he perceives as the students' unchecked hedonism & lack of self-discipline for taking c/o serious business.

As the inside jacket blurb of my hard-cover edition of The Joy Makers explains it: "Imagine a world where you can have everything you want, or if you can't have it, you can be psychologically conditioned not to want it. Imagine a world so technologically advanced that happiness and contentment can be achieved without effort, a world where there is no sickness or hunger, no deprivation, no want no striving, no disappointment. Imagine that any experience can be yours and any fantasy or desire reconstructed by machines and fed directly into your cerebral cortex. Imagine all this, and you have the world of James Gunn's The Joy Makers, a nightmare world of indolence, of lost purposes, of the death of civilization."

The Joy Makers was originally published as separate stories in 1954 & 1955 & then published as a bk in 1961. The Mind Master was published in 1980. In it, we, again, have a society in wch constant pleasure & stimulation can be had w/ little or no personal effort. For the most part civilization has evolved to be on auto-pilot. The plot has evolved somewhat: chemical memory, a way for instant learning & for instant deep 'experiences' of secondhand authenticity is now the crux of the matter.

"It had started with chemical memory. Memory, it was discovered, was first encoded in complex protein molecules, later engraved in synaptic pathways. Chemical memory had changed society more than the Industrial Revolution. Schools disappeared. Only the perverse individual learned to read." - p 34

&, yes, thanks to this, civilization is in danger of collapse b/c the Mind Master minding the stores, so to speak, will die eventually & there's no-one to take his place. As I wrote in my review of Kampus:

"It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'."

I can't say I completely disagree w/ Gunn, even tho I'm a bit of a hedonist myself, people who don't balance the pursuit of pleasure w/ some more pragmatic survival skills might die of liver ailments earlier than most, etc..

"Hence the dreamers. hence the beautiful bright children who had nothing to do with their time but pursue pleasure and when pleasure palled, sesnation beyond pleasure: guilt, humiliation, sin, degradation, decadence, sorrow, grief, pain. . . ." - p 34

Then again, I don't think that Gunn's dire warnings of a future world where people will be 'free' to wallow in such titillations is very likely to ever come. A much more likely fate is that fundamentalists will do their best to remove any hedonistic options in favor of slavery to people posing as
representatives of 'god'.

Nonetheless, in The Mind Master there's withdrawal for the poppets, pretty obviously inspired by the drug withdrawals of addicts contemporary to the era in wch the bk was written: "The fourth day she crawled to him and kissed his feet and begged him for one little cap. "I'll do anything," she said. "Just one little cap. You can pick it out. And then we'll be like we were before. I'll be anything you want me to be. I'll stay with you. I'll—"" (p 34)

The "Mnemonist", the guy who's eschewed the more common pleasures of the "poppets" (chemical memory pleasure seekers), is the human interface in the computer system that keeps it all running. The Mnemonist immediately evokes for me A. R. Luria's wonderful bk The Mind of the Mnemonist, a psychologist's account of a man w/ perfect recall. Sure enuf, Gunn references the bk specifically:

"the russian psychologist
alexander luria
described a man
whose memory seemed
to have no limit
a mnemonist whose mind
was so extraordinary
that luria wrote of him
in terms usually reserved
for the mentally oll
he could commit to memory
in a couple of minutes
a table of fifty numbers
which he could recall
in every minute detail
many years later
his greatest difficulty
was in learning
how to forget
the endless trivia
that cluttered his mind" - p 173

& earlier: "these days, with memories available at every console, there was so much to forget. Forgetting was an art. Men can drown in memories, and reality can become as elusive as a dream." (p 68)

Gunn's writing is a tad more experimental than usual in his chapters insofar as he interrupts the plot-driven paragraphs w/ 3 columns of the types of relevant info to the Mnemonist's tube-tied position. If I knew how to create columns on GoodReads (& I'm not sure I can anyway) I'd present sample columns in the bk's position. Instead, I'll present them in sequence:

Column 1:

"courage he said
and pointed
toward the land
this mounting wave
will roll us
homeward soon
in the afternoon
they came unto a land
in which it seemed
always afternoon"

Column 2:

"mcconnell continued
training planarians
at michican
he cut them
in half
and waited
for the pieces
to generate
into
whole worms"

Column 3:

"cultivator
421
is
destroying
plants
pull
it
in
for
overhaul" - p 8

The 1st column is from "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred Tennyson. But it's not all from "The Lotos Eaters":

Column 1:

"to die
to sleep
perchance to dream
ay there’s the rub
for in that sleep
of death
what dreams may come
when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil
must give us pause" - p 46

Perhaps most of you will recognize that as from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The Mnemonist isn't completely unique as a human willing to take on lonely but crucial responsibilities. There're also the Historian & the Volunteers. One of the Volunteers is a surgeon:

"But he was a surgeon in a time when no one was a surgeon anymore, when no one studied the old skills and arts. In this capsule culture maintained by self-repairing machines directed by omniscient computers, everyone did just what he or she wanted to do; people pursued pleasures in their own peculiar ways, and if something had to be done that the computers and their tools could not do, a volunteer would inject a capsule and the synthesized proteins would provide instant memory of how that action could be accomplished and of how the muscles and the nerve endings felt when they were doing it. That was the miracle of chemical learning." - p 67

That interesting premise is developed by Gunn to include: "which brought him a steadily increasing number of patients as new ailments arose among the poppets, ailments whose diagnosis and treatment were not programmed into the computers." (p 67)

Another non-poppet character is Sara: ""I was—am a synthesist," she said. "I don't create anything, but I put things together in new combinations.["] (p 82) I've previously encountered the idea of the synthesist in John Brunner's "The Fourth Power" story (1960) in Out of my Mind - from the Past, Present and Future & in his Stand on Zanzibar (1968) as well as in Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage (1968).

One of the most intriguing paths that the bk pursues is a dreaming of Homeric epic: ""That's good news," she says. "Achilles is a savage. He's as big as a bull and as swift as a deer, and he lives only to fight and kill. Besides, they say that Thetis, his divine mother, made him invulnerable when he was a baby."" (p 118) The one movie that I've seen that features the character of Achilles has him as slender rather than "as big as a bull". My superficial searches for a physical description of him as one or the other in The Iliad & in online discussions of it don't answer the question. The conditions of this dreaming are such that the dreamer becomes a 'God':

"I see Aeneas—son, they say, of Anchises and Aphrodite—defend the corpse of Pandarus from the giant Diomedes. I see Diomedes raise overhead a rock I think no man can lift, and I feel it shatter the hip joint of Aeneas. But he does not fall. He must not die. He must live, I sense, for another purpose, perhaps to save Ilium and me.

Aeneas is destined to survive and to save the House of Dardanus from extinction. The great Aeneas shall be king of Troy and shall be followed by his children's children in the time to come.

"I remove him from the battle as I had removed myself, leaving Diomedes to wonder what god has intervened. I will the hip healed and send a phantom Aeneas to fight upon the plain lest the Trojans be discouraged." - p 131

I recently noted in my review of Rudy Rucker's Postsingular that Rucker, too, explains 'gods' not as divine beings but in scientific terms that revive their interest-level for me:

"One thing I like about Rucker's work is the way he explains fanciful mythology, angels, eg, by using contemporary General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (or ideas from other scientific arenas) - even if he is playing fast & loose w/ them." - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante

All in all, there's alot to like in James Gunn's The Mind Master: the What-If? potentials are solidly explored & I felt stimulated to imagine some that weren't.… (lisätietoja)
 
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tENTATIVELY | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Apr 3, 2022 |

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Associated Authors

Dan Abnett Writer
Nicole Perlman Screenwriter
David Eggby Director of photography
Charles Roven Producer
Elizabeth Banks Actor, Director
Matthew Candelaria Editor, Contributor
Steve Carr Director
James Duffy Director
Griffin Dunne Director
Brett Ratner Director
Bob Odenkirk Director
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Rick Wilber Contributor
Peter Wood Contributor
Wole Talabi Contributor
Elizabeth Bear Contributor
Naomi Kanakia Contributor
Greg Egan Contributor
S. Qiouyi Lu Contributor
James Van Pelt Contributor
Jason Sanford Contributor
Mercurio D. Rivera Contributor
David Goodis Screenwriter
Robert Reed Contributor
KA Teryna Contributor
T. J. Berry Contributor
Ian Creasey Contributor
Brad Aiken Contributor
Mary Anne Mohanraj Contributor
David Moles Contributor
Alexander Bachilo Contributor
Ray Nayler Contributor
Jeff Wadlow Director
Lawrence Kimble Screenwriter
Chris Pratt Actor, Actor.
Sean Gunn Actor
Isaac Asimov Contributor, Introduction
Tyler Bates Composer
Theodore Sturgeon Story, Contributor
Ben Davis Director Of Photography.
Jonathan Schwartz Film Producer.
Lee Pace Actor
H. G. Wells Contributor
Pamela Sargent Author, Contributor
Poul Anderson Contributor, Introduction
Harry Harrison Contributor
Gregory Benford Contributor, Author
Robert A. Heinlein Contributor
Victoria Alonso Executive Producer
Kevin Feige Producer
Ursula K. Le Guin Contributor
Roger Zelazny Contributor
Robert Silverberg Contributor
Damon Knight Contributor, Translator
Arthur C. Clarke Contributor
Brian W. Aldiss Contributor
J. G. Ballard Contributor
John Brunner Contributor
George Zebrowski Author, Contributor
Gordon R. Dickson Contributor
Jules Verne Contributor
Rudyard Kipling Contributor
Jorge Luis Borges Author, Contributor
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H. P. Lovecraft Contributor
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Joanna Russ Contributor
C. L. Moore Contributor
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David Newman Composer
George A. Romero Original story
John Murphy Composer
Edgar Allan Poe Contributor
Edward Bellamy Contributor
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Ludvig Holberg Contributor
Fitz James O'Brien Contributor
Lucian of Samosata Contributor
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Cyrano de Bergerac Contributor
Ambrose Bierce Contributor
Tommaso Campanella Contributor
Jonathan Swift Contributor
Thomas More Contributor
Mary Shelley Contributor
Francis Bacon Contributor
Roger Corman Introduction
E. M. Forster Contributor
Julian Huxley Contributor
Lester del Rey Contributor
Edmond Hamilton Contributor
Olaf Stapledon Contributor
Jack Williamson Contributor
A. E. Van Vogt Contributor
Jack London Contributor
Aldous Huxley Contributor
Abraham Merritt Contributor
David H. Keller Contributor
Terry Carr Author
Gene Wolfe Author
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Gordon Eklund Contributor
Tom Reamy Contributor
C. L. Grant Contributor
Mayling Ng Acteur
John Cena Actor
Frank Zero Translator
Tommaso Landolfi Contributor
Herbert W. Franke Contributor
Wenguang Zheng Contributor
Gérard Klein Contributor
Alexandr Kramer Contributor
Wolfgang Jeschke Contributor
Karel Čapek Contributor
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Josef Nesvadba Contributor
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E. T. A. Hoffmann Contributor
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Eve Arden Actor
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Lew Ayres Actor
John Hoyt Actor
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Mitchell Hooks Cover artist
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Stephan Martiniere Cover artist
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Teokset
85
Also by
43
Jäseniä
2,778
Suosituimmuussija
#9,243
Arvio (tähdet)
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50
ISBN:t
205
Kielet
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