{"id":199,"date":"2008-11-28T06:45:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-28T14:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=199"},"modified":"2008-11-28T06:45:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-28T14:45:00","slug":"perdido-shell-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=199","title":{"rendered":"Perdido Shell Station"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a onblur=\"try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}\" href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/uploaded_images\/perdido-734606.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 150px;\" src=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/uploaded_images\/perdido-734604.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>From the outline for <i>Intelligent Design<\/i>, a near-future Crichtonesque (except, you know, well-written) novel currently languishing on my back burner:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nate Hochachka arrives on Baffin Island under complete news blackout.  He has no idea why CSIS wants him here:  he&#8217;s freshly-minted faculty at the University of British Columbia, still paying off his student loans and trying to come to terms with the ubiquitous back-stabbing politics and infighting of an underfunded department (Hochachka&#8217;s doctorate is in the neuroecology of marine invertebrates\u2014 not the most lucrative niche of the biotech age).    Sequestered in a prefab boardroom on the edge of Frobisher Bay, a woman from the Ministry of Natural resources tells him he&#8217;s been brought in to advise on a matter of national security.  A PetroCan underwater wellhead has been wrecked in the disputed zone between Canada and the United States.<\/p>\n<p>Such mishaps happen all the time, of course:  sometimes it\u2019s one of the vagaries of a hazardous environment, sometimes an act of sabotage posing as one.  What makes this particular event remarkable is a three-second fragment of video footage recovered from a seabed camera, just moments before all telemetry went offline.<\/p>\n<p>The wellhead was attacked and disabled by a pair of giant squid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now check out <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2008\/11\/081124-giant-squid-magnapinna.html\">this article<\/a> from National Geographic (thanks to Karen Fernandez for the link), paying special attention to the embedded video.<\/p>\n<p>I miss the seabed.  I want to go back.<\/p>\n<p>I am definitely working on the wrong book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the outline for Intelligent Design, a near-future Crichtonesque (except, you know, well-written) novel currently languishing on my back burner: Nate Hochachka arrives on Baffin Island under complete news blackout. He has no idea why CSIS wants him here: he&#8217;s freshly-minted faculty at the University of British Columbia, still paying off his student loans and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deep-sea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}