Also, last week I showed up as a subject of discussion on episode 28 of the Sofanauts<\/a>, a regular podcast from Starship Sofa<\/a> (which recently celebrated its 100th installment by releasing a nifty little retro anthology<\/a> featuring some of the stories they’ve presented in the past \u2014 the roster<\/a> features such heavyweights as Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock as well as lesser lights such as myself, although personally I think my author photo is far and away the most endearing of the lot).\u00a0 Anyway, Ep 28 is a discussion between Tony Smith (the man behind the entire Sofa brand), John DeNardo, and Neil Clarke.\u00a0 It tootles along just fine for most of its 47 minutes, covering a range of topics from Octavia Butler to George R.R. Martin, until about the 38 minute mark.\u00a0 Then, WHUMP:\u00a0 someone says something about “dark” sf. And they spend the next six minutes on the subject of my nihilistic outlook and my quirky reading voice.\u00a0 I bring it up now, though, because some of you may remember “The Things”, that reinvention-of-the-Carpenter-movie story I was working on a while back, which stalled for fear of legal consequences<\/a>.\u00a0 And if you listen to that segment, you’ll find out where that story’s ended up.<\/p>\n Finally, anyone recognize this piece of art?<\/p>\n No?\u00a0 How about this one?<\/p>\n These are not illustrations for the latest Chucky In Space movie (although now that I’ve put it out there, it’s probably only a matter of time).\u00a0 These are lifted from the manual for Eclipse Phase<\/em><\/a>, the brand-spanking new [update:\u00a0 Creative Commons!<\/em>] RPG from Catalyst.\u00a0 I’ve had a chance to glance through said manual, and it looks like glorious post-human, post-singularity nihilism for those of you who think that Charlie Stross doesn’t go into enough detail and that I’m too optimistic. I’m looking forward to delving deeper into this universe \u2014 not least because it contains a strain of Exsurgent virus called “Watts-MacLeod”, which apparently gifts its infectees with psionic abilities. I’ve been told this is a deliberate homage, which I believe because I’m one of a dozen sf authors listed on EP’s Resources<\/a> page.<\/p>\n Now if they’d made it an STD, I would have felt truly<\/em> honored…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m going to sneak in a few bits of self-aggrandizing tub-thumpery here, in the hopes that the last few postings have mitigated the ‘crawl’s tendency to list to all-about-me.\u00a0 First, however, a bit of housekeeping:\u00a0 I’ve just learned that anyone posting comments on this blog is forced to enter their name and e-mail up front.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808","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=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":820,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"EP---04---65---infugee-synth-vacworkers\"](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/EP-04-65-infugee-synth-vacworkers-1024x442.jpg\" "\\"EP---04---65---infugee-synth-vacworkers\\"")
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