Thanks to GalleyCat, I just learned that Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime line will be publishing The Dead Man’s Brother, a previously unpublished novel by Roger Zelazny.

The manuscript, supposedly completed 30 years ago and long thought lost, was apparently recently discovered among Zelazny’s papers.

Roger Zelazny was once one of my gods. I loved “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, Nine Princes in Amber (the sequels, not so much), “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” and many other of his short stories and novels, so a new work, particularly one from when he was still in his prime, is big news for me. (more…)

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.