Eileen Gunn

Eileen Gunn at Wiscon, 2006

Eileen Gunn in 2006.

Eileen Gunn (born June 23, 1945, Dorchester, Massachusetts) is a science fiction author and editor based in Seattle, Washington, who began publishing in 1978. Her story "Coming to Terms", inspired, in part, by a friendship with Avram Davidson, won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 2004. Two other stories were nominated for the Hugo Award: "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" (in 1989) and "Computer Friendly" (1990).

Background

Gunn has a background in high-tech advertising and marketing; she wrote advertising for Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1970s and was Director of Advertising at Microsoft in 1985.^[1] She is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop and is on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

A collection of her short stories, Stable Strategies and Others (2004, published by Tachyon Publications), was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the World Fantasy Award. The Japanese translation was awarded the Sense of Gender Award at the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan.^[2]

About the stories: "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" has generally been interpreted as a pastiche of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, with satiric relevance to late-20th-Century high-tech corporate culture. "Fellow Americans" (1991) posits an alternate history in which Barry Goldwater hired Roger Ailes to run his 1964 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon became the host of a TV game show called Tricky Dick.

Green Fire (1998), a collaborative novella by Gunn, Michael Swanwick, Pat Murphy, and Andy Duncan, is an homage of sorts, in which Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Grace Hopper take part in the Philadelphia Experiment, with the assistance of Nicola Tesla and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl.

In March 2014 a new anthology, Questionable Practices: Stories by Eileen Gunn was published by Small Beer Press.^[3]

She is also the editor/publisher of the webzine The Infinite Matrix. Her website The Difference Dictionary is an online concordance to The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.