Will the real Kuroda please stand up?

Those of you who have been enjoying my new novel Wake as it is being serialized in Analog will have met the character of Dr. Masayuki Kuroda, the information theorist who specializes in how the human retina encodes data; he is, as you will have seen, a major character in the book.

And he's named in homage to another vision specialist, the character of Kuroda played by Byron Chung in the 1972-73 NBC TV series Search (and the pilot film for it, which was called Probe).

Those who have read my autobiography know how important that series was to me. Naming a character in honor of someone on that show is my acknowledgment of that.

Here are four pictures of Byron Chung as Kuroda in PROBE Control, a mission-control-like center that monitored the activities of PROBE agents working for World Securities (that's Burgess Meredith as his boss, V.C.R. Cameron, in the third picture):









Why am I posting this today? Because this evening Carolyn and I, who are working our way through the first season of Lost on DVD, watched the 17th episode, and who should be the guest star, playing Mr. Paik, the father of Sun, but Byron Chung himself, 33 years later:



My thanks to my buddy Actingman for the Search screen captures. And if you happen to be a Search fan yourself, join us at the Probe Control Yahoo! Groups discussion group here.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site