The day after Science Fiction Age was canceled, I resigned my position at Sovereign Media and moved on a few weeks later to a company called CommTek, where I became the editor of the magazine Satellite Orbit. When it came time to write my first editorial, who should pop into my mind but Arthur C. Clarke.

Why?

Satellite Orbit was a massive (around 300 pages per issue) TV programming guide for owners of C-band satellite dishes, those 8-10″ foot behemoths which were the only sort of satellite available for the general public in the days before DirecTV. Which meant that if not for Clarke—who after all, invented the geosynchronous satellite—the magazine wouldn’t have even existed.

I e-mailed Clarke to tell him so, and he was kind enough to reply, which resulted in this editorial. (Click through twice to view it in readable form.) It appeared in Satellite Orbit‘s June 2000 issue.

Just one more example of the many ways in which we’re all interconnected. Not only did Clarke give me a love of science fiction—but he also gave me a job!

When I first started reading science fiction, my gods were three:

Isaac Asimov.

Robert Heinlein.

And Arthur C. Clarke.

Those were the writers I read and reread. Those were also the writers whom, when I first thought I might become a writer, I wanted to be. As far as I was concerned, they were science fiction.

In my late teens, when I began to rebel, I found a new set of gods. Once more, there were three of them:

Roger Zelazny.

Samuel R. Delany.

And Harlan Ellison.

Now that the last of my first set of gods has departed for a new odyssey, and I pause to mourn as many of us are doing today, I also find myself thinking that those entering science fiction today must have their own set of living gods, for the ones I began with must surely seem as ancient as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells did to me by the time I got around to reading them.

I won’t even begin to attempt to fill in those new names today, just say that even as I mourn the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, I also celebrate that continuum of which we all are a part.

We can only see so far today because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Clarke was definitely one of them. We are all indebted to him, and were extremely lucky to have had him with us for so long.