In addition to his distinguished career as a professor of English, James Gunn has also been a prolific writer whose body of work includes several novels and critical analyses of science fiction. In the mid-1980s, Easton Press began publishing a series of leather-bound collector editions called Masterpieces of Science Fiction, and Masterpieces of Fantasy, which featured some of the most important works in these genres. Gunn was commissioned to write introductions to these works, which allowed him to pay tribute to many authors who inspired and influenced him.In Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, Gunn has collected the most significant essays produced for the Easton series, along with prefaces the author wrote for reprints of his own novels. Cited here are some of the most significant authors and works of 19th and 20th century science fiction and fantasy, including H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, George Orwell's 1984, Robert A.

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, C. S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, David Brin's The Postman, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Stephen King's The Dead Zone, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Anne McCaffrey's Dragon's Eye, Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, John Crowley's Little, Big, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Drawing upon Gunn's lifetime of work in the field, these introductions include analyses of the individual works and the fields in which they were written. Gunn also briefly discusses each novel's significance in the science fiction canon. Collected here for the first time, these prefaces and introductions provide readers with insight into more than seventy novels, making Paratexts a must read for science fiction and fantasy aficionados.