In October,
Clarkesworld will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its very first issue, but for those of us behind-the-scenes, July (the seventh, to be precise) is where it all began. I was set on this path after a late-night conversation about the state of online fiction with Sean Wallace at Readercon. If you know your history, the state of things at that time could be best summarized as “in disarray.” There was very little respect for the medium and even less stability as markets came and went with high frequency. The closest thing to a success story,
SciFiction (edited by Ellen Datlow), had recently announced that it was ending.