"They say you should never meet your heroes, and I tell you whoever said that had lousy heroes. Well, the few of you reading this fortunate enough to know Harlan know that if you scheduled a call with him, you called immediately at the specified time. Not one minute before, not one minute after. You called right. On. Time. One day I did not. Harlan read me the riot act and demanded to know what was so fucking important that I made him wait twenty minutes for me. I revealed to him that I’d discovered that day that the woman who was my geek Yoda in high school, the girl who had introduced me to numerous films, books, and video games and had been the one who put Harlan's own books into my hands for the very first time, had died at all too young an age. In that moment Harlan became one of the most gentle souls I've ever spoken with. “Oh, kid,” he said somberly, “do I ever know how that feels.” Then he consoled me for an hour, asking about her, talking at length what it was like losing Asimov and Bradbury and too many countless others. Then he revealed to me his greatest fear: that though he outlived his friends, he would be swallowed up by them, forgotten to the mists of time as little more than a footnote to so many other careers."