I met James Gunn in 2014, when I was at a residential writing workshop at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. That may have been the first year he wasn't helping lead part of the workshop, but he was still keeping an eye on things and talking with students. He was -- as the name of the center tells you -- a champion of the idea that science fiction was literature worthy of academic study, which was a pretty controversial take in the humanities for a long time (and still is in some quarters, I suspect). I still refer to some of the material he wrote for that workshop, too.