I’ve got several major motivations for writing Idea Chemistry, and one of them involves leaving a clear, publicly available research trail that future Gunkel scholars—assuming there will be some—can easily follow.
This is 100 percent original research.
Nobody has ever pulled on these threads before—not even people who knew Gunkel or people who remember him today and consider themselves fans of ideonomy.
Along these lines, today’s newsletter issue may be more important as a historical annex regarding Gunkel’s professional work than a discussion of Gunkel or ideonomy per se.
This historical-context is pretty important in my opinion.
It establishes Gunkel as a professional, a real futurist rather than just some obnoxious hanger-on who got kicked out of one too many academic lectures for asking annoying Socratic questions.
According to Austin writer Jo Zarboulas—who once profiled Gunkel for a never-published feature article—in 1969 a 21-year-old Gunkel dropped in on Herman Kahn, founder of the iconic Hudson Institute, and got offered a consulting gig after a “single chat.”
This was confirmed by David Stipp, who wrote about Gunkel in his 1987 Wall Street Journal article and called this initial encounter with Kahn “their first rap session.”
Imagine being able to get away with this today, just walking into some high-powered intellectual’s office and getting offered a job!
Maybe if you had the same blazing fast mind and eidetic memory that Patrick Gunkel had…
Although no documentary proof of Gunkel’s early work for the Hudson Institute exists, he did leave a paper trail throughout the second half of the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Gunkel’s ideonomy grant was also paid out through the Hudson Institute, which is something I discovered in the course of my research.
That means his relationship with the Hudson Institute spanned from 1969 to sometime in the early 1990s.
The following five Hudson Institute products, issued between 1975 and 1977, either credit Gunkel or have been influenced by his thinking.
There’s a sixth catch-all product category as well, which contains a few tantalizing hints about other work Gunkel may have done—even though I’ve never found the documentary proof.
You may very well be surprised if you read to the end.
1. Preliminary Report: NASA Bicentennial Planning
With the 200-year-anniversary of America’s founding approaching, the Hudson Institute was contracted to provide support for NASA’s celebration planning. The title page for the August 8, 1975, report cites Herman Kahn and Anthony Weiner as the primary authors, with Gunkel and three other Hudson Institute staff listed as contributors.
Incredibly, Gunkel appears to have so prolifically embraced the assignment that the material he drafted was sequestered to an appendix that is longer than the actual report!
In fact, Kahn and Anthony Weiner were evidentially somewhat embarrassed by Gunkel’s work and sought to distance themselves from it as evidenced by the incredible disclaimer that served as the preface to Gunkel’s appendix:
“The following appendix does not represent the consensus of the Hudson group, or any major thrust of the Hudson work…”
Incredibly, I’ve uncovered archival evidence that NASA was in fact very interested in Gunkel’s “far-out” speculations and asked Hudson for more optimistic scenario modeling!1
This is probably what led the Institute to incorporate Gunkel’s Efflorescent World View into a later NASA report (#5 below), although Gunkel had already left the Institute by that time.
Gunkel’s work on space was ultimately peeled off and given its own Hudson publication code (see #2 below).
See Preliminary Report: NASA Bicentennial Planning (Tricentennial Retrospective Conferences). The publication code for the report is HI-2310/2-D.
The only copy of the report I know about can be found in Ed Fredkin’s archives in MIT’s Distinctive Collections.
2. The Future of Space—An Encyclopedic Prospect
Based on similarities to Gunkel’s Appendix B contained in Hudson’s draft report to NASA, Gunkel’s efforts seem to have been peeled off the original report and relegated to the report I wrote about last week.
The report was given its own Hudson Institute publication code: HI-2353-P.
It’s difficult for me to imagine that this report, dated October 1975 and bearing the Institute’s logo, was disseminated widely given the tremendous amount of marginalia that appear on the only known copy—perhaps Gunkel went back and added these notes and scribblings at a later date.
The December 1975 issue of L-5 News, a space colonization society newsletter, advertised the availability of Gunkel’s only Hudson Institute publication alongside another space study conducted by the Institute for NASA.
The announcement states:
Also available is a book by Pat Gunkel entitled The Future of Space: An Encyclopedic Prospect. The author tells us that ‘My book is intended to be something of a reference book, the basic working manual of the future of space field, and is filled with analyses, lists, glossaries, etc. in order to stimulate future thought and give rise to a serious discussion. It is meant to breathe life into what has recently seemed a fading human prospect, and to present an accurate and elaborate picture of what space can really mean.
I would love to know if a “clean” version of the report was ever published, or if anyone who ordered the report ended up getting a photocopy that included Gunkel’s handwritten notes all over it.
3. The Next 200 Years in Space: NASA Bicentennial Planning
Authored by Herman Kahn and William M. Brown, the final version of the report listed under #1 includes a number of additional Hudson Institute staff as contributors including Gunkel.
Although a comprehensive review would need to be conducted to identify Gunkel’s specific contributions in the body of the report, Appendix B—a two-page list entitled “List of Potential Spacial Attractions for Tourists”—was clearly written by Gunkel.
The report was delivered to NASA on October 23, 1975; the publication code for the report is HI-2352-RR.
There is perhaps only one copy of this report in existence, available through the NASA reading room at the space agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
4. The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America & the World
The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America & the World was a book-length report published in May 1976 by William Morrow & Co.
I mentioned this book in a prior post about my own academic work.
The cover bears the names of Herman Kahn, William Brown, and Leon Martel, but Gunkel is credited in the Acknowledgements section along with a number of other Institute staffers.
The report was intended to rebut the doom-and-gloom predictions made in the Club of Rome’s infamous 1972 book The Limits to Growth.
Without presenting a whole lot of evidence, Kahn et al. theorize that the future will be bright and the concerns that seem to be the most pressing problems—pollution, agricultural shortfalls, wealth gaps—are not actually the most important concerns of the future.
The report is available on the Internet Archive.
In addition, a pre-publication version is available through the CIA’s FOIA reading room—just search for “Patrick Gunkel” here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/home
5. Long-Term Prospects for Developments in Space (A Scenario Approach)
A year after Gunkel left one of his paid consultancies with the Hudson Institute, another report was produced under contract with NASA.
Entitled Long-Term Prospects For Developments in Space (A Scenario Approach), the report was issued on October 30, 1977, and credited to William M. Brown and Herman Kahn.
Although Gunkel was not mentioned as a contributor to this report, Leon Martel has written that Gunkel’s personal philosophy, the Efflorescent World View, was an important influence on the report.2
Archival research I conducted shows that Gunkel tried to get Herman Kahn to incorporate the World View into The Next 200 Years (#4 above), but Kahn ultimately did not.
Instead, it looks like the World View was not entirely discarded, but used as the basis for the most optimistic of scenarios in this later report.
The publication code for the report is HI-2638-RR, and the report is available here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19780004167
6. Other Hudson Institute Work
But that’s not all, believe it or not!
Although Gunkel himself suggested he was paid to develop several other products for the Institute, including a comprehensive accounting of futuristic concepts—outside of science fiction literature—called “A Catalog of Futural Ideas,” at this point I’ve never laid eyes on these works, which would be critically important not just for future Gunkel scholars but for science fiction scholars generally.
Another interesting tidbit about Gunkel’s work for the Hudson Institute can be found in a Frederick Pohl essay entitled “The Study of Science Fiction: A Modest Proposal.”
Pohl, one of the grandmasters of science fiction literature—his Gateway novels inspired the writing team behind The Expanse series—argued for a more intense study of science fiction literature, using as evidence for his argument a reference to Gunkel’s work.
“Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute,” Pohl wrote, “once assigned a post-doc [sic] researcher named Pat Gunkel to read the entire works of A.E. van Vogt and tabulate his specific predictions.”
Pohl’s essay was published in 1997, which would have placed Gunkel’s work potentially over 20 years in the rear-view mirror, so I’m not sure if Pohl got the details of the assignment exactly right.
Nevertheless, whatever Gunkel did with science fiction literature for the Hudson Institute, the work product would be a marvelous discovery if it could ever be found.
If a private holder of the manuscript never comes forward, I’ve discovered there are Hudson Institute archives at Indianapolis University in Ohio and Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., that could be worth checking out.
I’ve also found evidence that Gunkel participated in various other Hudson Institute initiatives, both in the 1970s and early 1980s.
While we are unlikely to find his name referenced in other Hudson Institute products, given what I’ve read about the freewheeling intellectual culture of the Institute I think it’s safe to say that Gunkel may have had an influence on others, given how transformative an encounter with Gunkel allegedly was for so many people.
(1) Original archival research at NASA HQ. Specifically a memo/transcript of a discussion between NASA and the Hudson Institute upon receipt of Hudson’s preliminary report.
(2) Martel, Leon. Mastering Change: The Key to Business Success. Simon & Schuster. pp. ix, 309.
(3) Email exchange with one of Gunkel’s prior Hudson Institute colleagues.