This is David Sington:
He directed In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about nine men who’ve done something that the rest of us (in history or in the present) have never done: walk on another world, the moon. The rare moon men are asked to express the feeling of seeing the earth as a planet in the sky, as another world, as a complete object? “Earth hung like a fragile jewel in the blackness,” says one moon man.

I had few drinks with the director in SIFF’s guest lounge in the W. After talking about his documentary, we began talking about Francis Bacon. I’ve just read The New Organon but not the book Sington highly recommended, The New Atlantis. “It’s a slim book. You’d be with it in a second. But I wrote a book with my wife called Paradise Dreamed. It has a section on [The New Atlantis], which is about a utopia managed by scientists.”
“Sounds Platonic,” I said.
“It is Platonic, and might very well be the first work of science fiction in history.” During this pleasant conversation, we ate fat shrimp and salmon on sticks.

In the Shadow of the Moon screens today at 7 pm at McCaw Hall.