I just got back from running Nebula Con, SFWA’s annual convention for the Nebula Awards. I feel hugely honored that they entrusted me with this responsibility, and it was an unforgettable experience that I will delve into more next week.
The award ceremony itself was uplifting and moving in a way that I did not expect. You can watch it here if you haven’t had a chance to see it. Especially N.K. Jemisin’s speech which was is profound, moving, challenging, and a balm to all of us in these uncertain times.
Partway through the ceremony, they showed an honor roll of all the folks we have lost in the SFF community over the last year. But one name was missing, due to the fact that his passing was only recently discovered.
Jim Comer was a friend of mine. We had a somewhat complicated relationship. Jim could be a real pain in the ass, and I always suspected he was on the spectrum, though he never actually told me so himself. He became frustrated with me easily, but he never held a grudge for long.
Jim was also an incredible human being. He had an eidetic memory, especially for science fiction and fantasy. He would bring up speculative fiction authors, whom I had never heard of or had never read, and would expect me to know all the details of their work.
Sometimes I played along and pretended that I did. Sometimes I just confessed that I didn’t, and marveled at how he kept everything sorted in that amazing brain of his.
He was a teacher by profession, most recently working with migrant kids in a school outside of Sacramento, helping them figure out how to fit into this strange new world they found themselves in.
Jim was a tireless advocate for his students, especially the queer ones. As a gay man, he had a special sensitivity for the kids who were outsiders and and would help them to find their place. He would hold regular gaming sessions after school with these kids, doing role-playing games, many of which he invented himself. In fact, he actually published a few RPG books back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, something I never knew about him until I did a little research after his death.
I remember one trans kid in particular who Jim took an interest in, helping to guide him through the stress of coming out to his family and navigating his school environment. He was fierce in his defense of his LGBTQ+ kids, even if it cost him at work.
Jim was also modest to a fault. He had spent a lot of time in the SFF community, and would often casually drop the name of a writer that he knew or met who was way more famous than either Jim or I. But it was never done to advance his own status, only on that matter of fact way he might announce that he had eaten eggs and bacon for breakfast.
He was also a writer. He wrote a few short stories set on a generation ship that had forgotten what it was – one of my favorite topics. And he worked for years and years on stories set in his own Pendleton’s World, a human-colonized world on the moon circling a gas giant. They were sci-fantasy stories, and Jim was meticulous with the science in them. His fantastic brain came to play, throwing in concepts that weren’t necessary to enjoy the story, but that nevertheless would pan out scientifically if you cared to take a deeper dive into them.
Pendleton’s World never got published. I’m hoping that it will in the future, to help secure Jim’s place as a science fiction and fantasy author.
And finally, Jim was the person who inspired my story The Last Run, based on a conversation about the unlikelihood that FTL travel would ever be possible. Which led, of course, to the Dragon Eater and its sequels set on Tharassas. If you enjoyed that series, you have Jim to thank.
He was young, too young, when he was felled by a heart attack that took his life almost instantly. He was just two years older than me.
We used to meet once a month for either coffee or lunch, and talk about science fiction and fantasy, politics, and our lives. I treasured these times with Jim, especially when I was able to wring a smile of delight out of him. He had this silly grin he would do that just lit you up when you managed to get one out of him – see the pic above. As a normally very serious looking guy, it was such a pleasure to make him smile.
I was in the middle of running the convention this week when I got the news. He passed away about a month ago, and a member of Jim’s family had notified someone on Facebook, who then posted it on Jim’s page. That made its way to another author friend of mine, who had mentored Jim, and who messaged me.
Jim lived less than ten miles from me, and for a month I didn’t know he was gone. I’m going to have to sit with that for a long time, and with the news of his unexpected death.
I’m still processing Jim’s passing. I missed a coffee date with him just days before he died because of a misunderstanding and the business of getting ready for the convention. I assumed that I would get back to him and we figure something out when I returned from Chicago.
Sadly, that day will never come. It’s still not quite real to me that he’s gone.
As I said before, Jim could be a pain in the ass, but he was also a genuinely open, kind human being, one whom I will miss greatly.
We stand on the shoulders of giants in this field, and Jim was truly one of them.