Career
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. She is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop and is on the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
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 television game show called Tricky 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: by Eileen Gunn was published by Small Beer Press.