A prime focus of mine, at least as far as this blog series is concerned, is the author-legacy thing. My own, for one. I’ve done a certain amount of fiction writing over the decades that I want people to know about, to learn about, to be reminded of, to not forget. But not limited to my my own. As a member of Book View Café, I’m spending and have spent many hours in a cooperative effort to do keep the reading public aware of my colleagues in the group. And then there’s one more area of focus. From time to time I can’t help thinking about those, unlike me and unlike my BVC peers, that no longer have an advocate speaking for them at all.
The catch to legacy maintenance is that it doesn’t happen passively. Nearly gone are the days when a forgotten author was given fresh attention because a potential reader stumbled across their books on library shelves or deep down the narrow aisles of used-book emporia. There are still people who read fiction, but these days their process of locating something new to read is so often calculated. They look for a copy of something they’ve already heard about, most often by going on-line and entering in a title or an author name into a search engine. Legacy works do attract attention, here and there and now and then, but it’s because the author is alive and is engaging in sustained promotion.
Not every author is still around to tickle the algorithm. That’s true even if they should still be around. This summer I found myself thinking of one such case. I was sitting on my sofa watching television. A commentator mentioned Hurricane Katrina. It triggered a memory of being at a science fiction convention in Seattle in 2005. The storm had just ended and was a frequent topic of conversation that weekend. As it happens, when I think of that convention, I tend to picture Jim Killus, because that was the last place where and final occasion when I saw him.
In a bookcase behind that very sofa I still have Jim’s novels, tucked there amid other science fiction and fantasy works by authors whose last names begin with “K”. (The photo at the top of this blog shows those very copies of those two books.) I still recall the array of short stories of his that I’ve read. But as I turned off the TV set and turned around to look at that bookcase, I experienced a sinking feeling that I was among a vanishing few who could claim that sort of familiarity with his work.
As I recall, Jim was wearing a bandage on one of his thumbs at the convention. I don’t recall if we discussed the reason at the time. Certainly later on I came to know he’d had a growth of melanoma excised. Well, I imagine you know how it is with melanoma. Even a small bit, even when swiftly treated, can lead to metastasized cancer. The brain is often a place where a flare-up will manifest, and so it was with Jim. Just over three years after that convention appearance, after a hard fight and just as it seemed a final desperate round of cutting-edge treatment would lead to a worthwhile remission period, Jim died.
I found myself checking Jim’s SF Encyclopedia entry on-line and his Amazon page. The sinking feeling became anguish. So little there. No photographs of him at all. The book covers, yes, but I suspect those had been added only to serve the interests of used-book dealers and Ebay vendors.
At one time, there had been a link to an obit and a couple of remembrances. As I recall those were on the brief side, but were adequate. But that stuff got posted on sff.net, and that site no longer exists.
Well, fuck. That’s not how it ought to be. There ought to be more. There ought to be at least as much as I’m placing here, below this paragraph. It’s not comprehensive and it is far less than I would have been able to compose if I’d thought to do it ten years ago when his widow, Amy, was still alive to help out. But it’s what I can manage at this time.
James Peter Killus, Jr. was born 1 June 1950 in Nashville, TN to parents James Peter Killus, Sr., a native of Montana, and Lanis Sue Embry, a native of Wilson County, GA. He was the first of their two children. Much or perhaps all of his youth was spent in Nashville, but from the mid-1970s onward, after obtaining his Master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, much of the remainder of his life was spent based on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, primarily in Berkeley and then in Pinole, though he spent at least one job-related sojourn in southern California, made at least one extended visit to New York City, and at the end of his life retreated to Grand Rapids, MI, where Amy’s many siblings were concentrated and where Jim underwent cancer treatment, and he died there 23 September 2008 at only fifty-eight years of age.
When I first met Jim, he was a bachelor and struck me as the sort of fellow likely to always be a bachelor, but he surprised me in the early 1990s. He resumed attendance of the Melville Nine writing workshop meetings after a hiatus of several months accompanied by his new bride, who was a constant and cheery presence at our gatherings forever after. That was Amy. More formally, she was Amelia Kathleen Sefton (1950-2016), an Army veteran and long-time member of the science fiction fan community — genre social circles being how she and Jim came to know one another. Amy had previously been married to Connor “Freff” Cochran, known within the science fiction field as a fan artist who often contributed spot illustrations to convention program books. Amy had her own convention persona as “Madame Ovary” and was known for her puppet-show routines leaning heavily upon “egg” puns.
That’s the happy couple themselves in the photo above. They did not have children. I have the sense this was their distinct preference, not just a side effect of beginning their legal union after they had both reached their forties. They were exceptionally well-matched. The fact that they were in their forties when they got hitched means they had enough life experience to recognize how compatible they were, and they demonstrated this harmony every time I encountered them.
Jim was a chemist, and also a scientist in a more general sense. He was also a tech writer. He was a long-time practitioner of aikido. These day-jobs and avocations consumed a lot of the hours he might have spent writing fiction and go a long way to account for his limited output. It wasn’t that he was writing a ton of stuff that just didn’t make the grade. It’s more the case that he was busy and tended to generate material in the interstices of his schedule, for example when he was between jobs.
When I refer to instances when Jim was “between jobs,” it is not equivalent to saying he was characteristically unemployable. He was an atmospheric chemist. His area of expertise was airborne particulate matter. Put differently, he was a smog scientist. That’s not a common occupation. He could have had a steady and perhaps even uninterrupted career if he’d been willing to swear allegiance to corporate masters. That wasn’t what he wanted for himself. So he didn’t always have work in his lane, and instead picked up temp positions doing tasks that while they were often “techy” did not have to do with atmospheric chemistry. One that I specifically recall was with a fiber-optics manufacturer. Once in a while, though, the bat signal lit up, saying he was needed. It was usually because a lawsuit was in progress, or an investigation, and the litigant or government agency would need data to show just how much pollution an offender had spewed into the skies. Jim got to play the role of expert witness because he was one of the few people with the knowledge base to vet the evidence who was not compromised by being an employee of the very industry or entity whose culpability was being brought into question.
I first met Jim by way of Sharon N. Farber (aka S.N. Dyer). She in turn was the first published genre writer I got to know on a face-to-face basis, back in 1976 when we both took a class in science fiction writing at Sonoma State University. Jim and Sharon had come to know one another in Berkeley both as a consequence of sf-fan mingling and by hanging out within the same chem-degree crowd. A handful of Jim’s earliest pieces were collaborations with Sharon, sometimes with additional collaborators Susanna Jacobson and/or Dave Stout.
The period from 1981 to 1985 was his heyday in terms of publication, most prominently with the appearance of his fantasy novel Book of Shadows from Ace Books in 1983 and then his novel Sunsmoke two years later from the same publisher, a novel that makes a nod toward Godzilla except that in Jim’s rendition, the monster is composed of sentient smog. Asimov’s was the showcase of much of his short fiction of that era. He never had another period of output that compared to those four years. From 1985 onward it was a story here, a story there, and seldom repeating either the type of tale or the publication venue. That was the thing about his muse; he didn’t tend to do the same sort of thing twice, and an unfortunate consequence is that he didn’t become part of any given editor’s “stable.” Altogether just under twenty stories made it into print during his lifetime, along with the two novels and a couple of essays (one in Omni, co-written with Sharon).
It is with wistfulness I recall Sharon in this context. She was witty and inventive and inspiring and she produced an awesome string of short fiction in her day. Usually it is all those positive associations that spring to my mind when I think of her. But I do remain distressed that she and Jim eventually had a falling out. The gist is, they were having a discussion about a topic that Sharon knew a great deal about, and Jim “had it wrong.” But Jim wasn’t the sort of guy who liked to admit it when he was wrong. Being right, and defending what he thought was right, was to him a moral imperative. That core of integrity was one of Jim’s strongest characteristics. Doing good in the world mattered. Speaking out and speaking truths, that mattered as well. Unfortunately, he was not infallible. In that instance, Sharon needed and deserved an apology, and when it didn’t come, the rift opened. As far as I know, it never closed.
For me, the personal bond followed the opposite trajectory. The more I knew Jim, the better I liked him, beginning with a mid-1980s encounter at a convention when he assured me that I really needed to pay attention to this new comic book series written by Alan Moore called Watchmen, which was then not quite halfway through its original twelve-issue run. I followed his advice. And then recognizing the way we were on the same page in that one respect, it went on from there, at first through more conversations at sf cons, and then at the monthly meetings of the Melville Nine and our subsequent workshop, Will Write For Food.
Jim was, to use an old term, curmudgeonly. To throw in a similar old cliché, he did not suffer fools gladly. He might keep silent out of a sense of diplomacy, but if forced to contribute to a conversation, he would speak truth rather than spare feelings. I appreciated that he would argue his side of a debate and would articulate why he thought the way he thought, and I mirrored this back at him. We had a synergy in that way. But certain other people found him abrasive. They avoided him. That was their loss. They didn’t take the time, or dare I say perhaps they did not have the ability to discern, that Jim was not acting out of malice. He wasn’t acting out of ego. He wasn’t being pompous.
I might even argue he was humble. I suspect other acquaintances might challenge me on that, but I will give this example: After his death, and after his family members and Amy’s family members back in the Great Lakes/Ohio Valley region had gone through their formal rites of grief, a memorial for Jim was held where some of us Bay Area folk could more easily attend. The place was the El Sobrante dojo where Jim had worked out. The host and eulogist-in-chief was the sensei, Elizabeth A. Lynn. And yes, I am speaking of the same Elizabeth A. Lynn well known in science fiction as the author of The Northern Girl and other novels, but she was in aikido-teacher mode that day and attendance was heavily weighted toward Jim’s martial-arts colleagues. When I referenced knowing him through science fiction and through writing, quite a number of those there were surprised to learn of that aspect of his life. He hadn’t mentioned it to them. He hadn’t tooted his own horn. It just wasn’t like him to brag.
I haven’t forgotten I’m here to speak of legacy. And I will do that now, but in two distinct ways. One, I bid you go and find Book of Shadows and Sunsmoke, and look through old issues of Asimov’s and Galaxy and Artemis Magazine if you have access to them, and check out Jim’s stuff. He did his part to make those pieces available to an audience, and though he is unable to do more in that regard, it’s enough as long as you’re motivated to complete the process.
The second thing is, I mourn for the rest, the stuff that is not there to find on the shelves. I remember it, and so do the surviving members of the Melville Nine and Will Write For Food. Jim had nearly as many stories in his literary trunk as he managed to find homes for. Many were quite good, but they fell between the categories editors were looking for. Worse is the fact that the trunk contained novels. Jim had a period in the 1990s (I think that’s when it was, but honestly, I can’t now recall) when he was “between jobs” and his muse woke up, and she spoke loud and clear. The result, Jim quickly wrote a couple of hard-sf novels about a Sam Spade sort of noir detective (and aikido expert) named Ed Honlin solving murders in the floating cloud cities of Venus in the 23rd Century. With a bare-bones prose style, the narrative whisked along for just under 60,000 words each, much like Jim’s 1980s novels, the length in keeping with the short paperbacks he had grown up and had an immense nostalgia for. It was a book length he believed in: absent of fat, preserving just the good stuff. Jim had time to get an outline and at least a fragment done on the third in the series before he had to accept a job offer and build up the household funds again, and he never had a chance to return to the project. Had the first two sold to a publisher, the scenario might have worked out differently, but editors were not looking for something as retro as the Ed Honlin sequence when the manuscripts hit their desks in the early 2000s. And then there’s the one that really got away. During that extended trip to New York City I referenced above, Jim had the ability to visit the main library and peruse the microfilm rolls containing newspaper pages of the year 1910. He wanted to create, and succeeded in creating, a narrative set in the Manhattan of that year that would be resolutely consistent with actual news reportage of the time, but which told the tale of a serial murderer as said perpetrator, a werewolf, is methodically discovered and tracked down by Damon Runyon and Bat Masterson. These two real-life individuals, both of whom were employed as sports writers in the city in 1910, are the viewpoint characters, with Runyon in the role of first-person narrator in his chapters, pitched in the colorful voice Runyon himself used in his journalistic career, while Masterson’s chapters are written in third person but in prose that matches the diction and style Masterson observed in his dime novels. The two voices are highly distinct, and the interplay between the alternating points of view and means of expression is not only entertaining in itself, but contributes to the way the plot unfolds. Jim shared the completed portion with the group. Six chapters. It was all he had. He felt he couldn’t make further progress unless he could get back to Manhattan and pore through the library’s archive to find more of “the record” so that he could insert his invented doings into the space between the lines. Alas, the chance never came.
