Talks with the Masters by George Zebrowski

Author:George Zebrowski
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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6 Roger Caras was an assistant and publicist for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

7 Clarke shared his home in Sri Lanka with Hector Ekanayake, his wife Valerie, and the couple’s three daughters. Hector Ekanayake’s brother Leslie, one of Clarke’s closest friends, a fellow diver, and a partner in his business ventures, died in a motorcycle accident in 1977.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES GUNN

George Zebrowski: What did you think you were doing when you started writing?

James Gunn: I started several times, at different points in my life and for different reasons. The first time was when I was in kindergarten and wrote a two line verse. It was doggerel, but my father, a printer, thought it was remarkable and printed it on a card. That may have been my first realization that the purpose of writing is to get published. I suspect that it was motivated by my discovery of reading maybe a year earlier. It was “Farmer Brown’s Boy Sees a Bear,” and the magic of seeing marks on a page become words infected me with a love for language that stayed with me the rest of my life.

The next point, after years of reading almost everything from works of art to pulp magazines (and it was the pulp magazines that had the greatest impact, beginning when I was ten and my father brought home the first Doc Savage magazine that may have convinced me that writing narratives like this was ordinary activity that anybody could do), my parents bought me a used portable typewriter, a Smith-Corona with a lever on the right side that raised the keys into typing position. That unleashed the pleasure of seeing my writing transformed into book or magazine-like words on a page and made it more real. I used it for writing school assignments (and during World War II carried it with me everywhere I was sent, mostly to write letters but sometimes verse and articles) and, when I was 16, a science fiction story that I sent to Astounding, got rejected, and has mercifully been lost (I don’t remember what it was about). My motive then was simply to get published.

I wrote radio plays in high school (there was an organization called “the Safety Pins”) and papers, and contributed to a student magazine when I was a sophomore in junior college, but my first real experience with publication came when I was a junior in journalism at the University of Kansas, where I wrote news stories for the student newspaper but, more importantly, columns and editorials and feature articles and occasional verse and saw them published. I chose journalism because I had already decided that writing would be my profession, and the only model I had for people getting paid to be writers was newspaper reporters.

Then, after the War, in my senior year, I wrote a lot of editorials for the University Daily Kansan as well as feature articles, but I also wrote a stage play for a playwriting class that got produced

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