Tag: science fiction

Required Reading: Neil Gaiman’s Tribute to Ray Bradbury

Today’s required reading is The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, an incredible and moving excerpt from an upcoming Bradbury tribute anthology, Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, which comes out July 10th. You can also hear him read it on Amanda’s SoundCloud account or read his blog posts on the matter here and here, which are also beautiful.

Ray Bradbury died on June 5th at the age of 91 as Venus was transiting the sun, mythic to the end. May his words reverberate through history forever.

Here Neil Gaiman explains the background of his perfect eulogy, originally written as a birthday present to the author (may we all be so lucky to receive such a gift):

I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in “Usher II” — a way that drove me to Poe.

I was going to read something in an intimate theatre space, very late at night, during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My wife, Amanda, and I were hosting a midnight show of songs and readings. I promised myself that I would finish it in time to read it to forty people seated on sofas and on cushions on the floor in a tiny, beautiful room that normally contained the Belt Up Theatre Company’s intimate plays.

Very well, it would be a monologue, if I was going to read it.

The inspiration came from forgetting a friend of mine. He died a decade ago. And I went to look in my head for his name, and it was gone. I knew everything else about him — the periodicals he had written for, his favourite brand of bourbon. I could have recited every conversation he and I had ever had, told you what we talked about. I could remember the names of the books he had written.

But his name was gone. And it scared me. I waited for his name to return, promised myself I wouldn’t Google it, would just wait and remember. But nothing came. It was as if there was a hole in the universe the size of my friend. I would walk home at night trying to think of his name, running through names in alphabetical order. “Al? No. Bob? No. Charles? Chris? Not them . . .”

And I thought, What if it were an author? What if it was everything he’d done? What if everyone else had forgotten him too?

I wrote the story by hand. I finished it five minutes before we had to leave the house to go to the theatre. I was a mass of nerves — I’d never read something to an audience straight out of the pen.

When I read it, I finished it with a recital of the whole alphabet.

Then I typed it out and sent it to Ray for his ninety-first birthday.

I was there at his seventieth birthday, in the Natural History Museum in London.

It was, like everything else about the man and his work, unforgettable.

— Neil Gaiman

The Long Now Foundation breaks ground

“We just completed the 12 — foot diameter, 500 foot deep vertical shaft for the 10,000 Year Clock.”

We used a mining technique called raise boring. Take a look at the video — it’s an interesting operation. Instead of drilling down from the top, you pull a large diameter reamer up to the surface from the bottom using a smaller diameter pilot hole — more efficient than a top-down drill because the rubble isn’t fighting gravity. It rains down beneath the advancing bore and gets hauled out a horizontal shaft at the bottom. Our next major step will be cutting the spiral stairway using a robotic stone cutting saw. In parallel, we’re also manufacturing and testing the Clock components.

extraordinary.

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs.

We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference.

Kevin Karsch, a Computer Science PhD Student, and his team at the University of Illinois are developing a software system that lets users easily and convincingly insert objects into photographs, complete with realistic lighting, shading, and perspective. According to their documentation, aside from a few annotations provided by the user, like where the light sources are, the software doesn’t need to know anything about the image. Even keeping in mind much demo videos are spot polished, I’m still astonished at how seamless it all seems. This could very well be ground breaking work.

our production meeting went past midnight.

How William Gibson discovered science fiction.

He sits on my bed, talking to his mother on the phone, his car keys plugged into my computer, taxidermy birds at his feet, familiar with my room. I have already met his scientist father and taken pictures of them both. Possibly this makes me uncomfortable.

We have been reacquainting ourselves after six years apart in the same city. It has been interesting, though unexpected. We are very different people than when we first spent time together in the almost perpetual darkness of the constant heaven threatening raves and parties that we used to work at. (We met, like Shane and I, (and Jacques and T. Paul), as part of the first incarnation of C.R.’s Fr8-train Land.) I think we have far more in common now than we ever might have then.

Perched on the roof of his truck, we watched the night occlude the city from Spanish Banks and discussed stars and noise, art and engineering, information architecture, and how to wire lights to make bursts of sound, constellations of old ideas polished into new. When we drove back into town, swaggered into the bar, and kidnapped Shane to star-crash on my couch, it was like we completed a circle that took almost a decade to make.

Human After All.
History begins now.

At work, my boy haunts the hallway from months in the past. A reflection of when we sat here over our greasy chinese picnic and laughed over chopsticks and our mismatched everythings. His eager grin and long legs folded, the mischief in his eyes conspiring against my cleverness. It’s difficult to be there some days. I catch my ears bent listening and I almost have to close my eyes against the superimposed image of his voice sitting next to me. He’s hung up the mirror-ball I gave him for his birthday and sent me a picture from L.A. It looks like the perfect accessory. As consolation, it beats a drum within me like the clapper in a bell. We had a good thing. He remains the happiest part of my dreams.

Robert Silverberg on Philip K. Dick.

These long summer evenings have been both good and bad for me. I’ve been getting up early, it being too sticky hot to stay in bed, but as the day molasses crawls down the windowpane of the sky, I don’t feel I’m accomplishing as much as I could be. I want to be as busy as sin, not living this meandering odd-jobs existence I seem to be dreaming up daily. Tuesday I’m on set again, but I haven’t heard about call-times yet. It’s still too early to say. My flashing re-boot of a film career is suffering from the drop in the American dollar. Crews are being pared down. It’s not as cheap to shoot here as it was five years ago. I’ve been keeping my fists up, but it proves to be difficult. The industry’s not being kind to any of us. It might be time to side-step into the Jolt and Doritos fuelled modern fortress of video games, like James wants me to.

William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present.