Notable Deaths

[Irrev-Black]

While wikipedia doesn't seem to have caught up yet, looks like SF writer Howard Waldrop is gone.

https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Ho ... ldrop.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Waldrop

Goodbye, and thanks for the inspirations, Sir.

[Irrev-Black]

Theme music composer for The Avengers, The Sweeney, The Professionals, and others, Laurie Johnson has left us.

Goodbye, and thanks.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68054498

[stylofone]

Goodbye Melanie. "Brand New Key" sounded joyous on the tinny loudspeaker at the Chas McCarron Baths in Canowindra in 1972.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... 234953843/

[Irrev-Black]

Goodbye Melanie. "Brand New Key" sounded joyous on the tinny loudspeaker at the Chas McCarron Baths in Canowindra in 1972.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/musi ... 234953843/

Bit of an acquired taste, sometimes, but sincere, she was.

Lay Down (Candles In The Rain) was a focal point of my first Wicked Drugs experience, aged all of 13.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/melanie ... erain.html

[Irrev-Black]

Goodbye, and respect, to Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/ ... /102277300

[stylofone]

I only just noticed... Christopher Priest. I have ticks next to "Inverted World" and "The Space Machine", and the film (but not the book) of "The Prestige". I hope to catch up on some of his others at some stage.

He used to write obits for teh Graun. John Clute wrote his. Class. I love teh graun for this.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/ ... t-obituary

[Irrev-Black]

Goodbye, and thanks, Karl Wallinger.

https://variety.com/2024/music/news/kar ... 235938501/

[Irrev-Black]

Goodbye, and thanks, Vernor Vinge.

Science fiction author and academic Vernor Vinge has departed this life, aged 79.

Vinge is credited as the first author to describe an immersive cyberspace, which he outlined in his 1979 novella True Names – five years before William Gibson's Neuromancer brought the idea to the mainstream.

Vinge's cyberspace – which he termed the "Other Plane" – was accessible by attaching electrodes to one's skull. Inhabitants referred to themselves as "Warlocks" and over the course of the novella illicitly accessed government databases.

Suffice to say, True Names made a mark and elements of the short work became staples of both SciFi and CompSci.

In 1993 he penned delivered a conference paper titled "The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era" that predicted the following:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended

He wasn't out by many years on the AI prediction. And his theory of "The Singularity" – an event after which human history changes course – was widely admired and even became the theme of a university in Silicon Valley.

His novels often used concepts from computer science.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/ ... _obituary/

[stylofone]

Goodbye, and thanks, Vernor Vinge.

I very much enjoyed "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky", but they were more high concept space opera type stories, I tried a bit of his cyber stuff and it didn't grab me. But yes, goodbye and thanks!

[Irrev-Black]

Goodbye, and thanks, Joe Flaherty. You brought us many smiles.