{"id":5030,"date":"2014-08-04T12:45:28","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T20:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5030"},"modified":"2014-08-06T16:40:14","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T00:40:14","slug":"assorted-interrogatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5030","title":{"rendered":"Assorted Interrogatives."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Theseus<\/a>

Theseus under construction in LEO, six weeks prior to launch.<\/p><\/div>\n

Coming up to breathe for a moment in between web site renovations (going well, thank you) and attempts to burrow through a tangled morass of Russian bureaucracy (not so much\u2014 in fact, that whole trip just might go tits-up over the next couple of days), I see a couple of interviews have gone live.\u00a0 In one of them\u2014 the last of Clay Dugger’s epic 5-part series Watching the Skies: From “Who Goes There?” to THE THING<\/i> \u2014 I basically jam with Mr. Dugger on the subject of “The Things”<\/a>, and how it fits into the greater Campbellian canon. I also seem to remember having some unkind words for the 2011 prequel, and some thoughts on Lamarckian biology, and differences between the movie and the Alan Dean Foster novelization, and that time when Dog-Kennel-Thing split into two halves and one half punched its way up through the ceiling and nobody seemed to worry about where it went or what it might be doing up there. I’m not really sure. The episode goes on for almost two hours (I don’t think a single part of the five weighs in at less than one), and we recorded it a while ago\u2014 so while I dimly remember having a blast on Skype, I’m kinda fuzzy on the content. For all I know at this point, I could’ve spent half the time giggling and making farting noises with my armpit.<\/p>\n

Still, if you have several hours to kill and you’re at all interested in a certain misunderstood shape-shifting alien, you could do worse than head over to the Chronic Rift Network and avail yourself of the wisdom of such folks as Dave Robison<\/a>, Paul K. Bisson<\/a>, Paul Elard Cooley<\/a>, and, well, me.<\/p>\n

The other interview<\/a> is of more recent vintage\u2014 it just went live on Friday, courtesy of our friends over at Clarkesworld<\/i>\u2014 and is more conventionally formatted in text instead of tones. It will take you significantly less than one hour forty five minutes to get through it all, and while a couple of the questions may have a familiar ring (Do you write from an outline? Does it scare you how fast reality catches up to your lame-ass predictions?<\/i>), there are others that, perhaps surprisingly, no one has asked me before (How hard is it to imagine you’re Siri Keeton?<\/i>) Also I change my long-held position about Scientists As Communicators. In fact, I turn 180\u00b0 on the subject.<\/p>\n

Which doesn’t mean that I’m any happier about it, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coming up to breathe for a moment in between web site renovations (going well, thank you) and attempts to burrow through a tangled morass of Russian bureaucracy (not so much\u2014 in fact, that whole trip just might go tits-up over the next couple of days), I see a couple of interviews have gone live.\u00a0 In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030","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=5030"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5036,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5030\/revisions\/5036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}