Back From The Dead: Interviews with Dan Rhodes and Scarlett Thomas

If you've ever published online content, you'll know that one of the great things about it is that it sticks around... potentially forever. Sometimes you don't want those photos from a party in 2002 resurfacing, but for Internet writers everywhere it's reassuring to know that their work has a longer shelf life than your average mid-list novel. All that hard work hasn't gone to waste.

Except, of course, when the unthinkable happens. While the Internet may seem to be an ethereal, magical place, surviving on dreams and desire, in reality it resides in servers. Physical, mechanical servers. That often go wrong.

Last year that's exactly what happened to respected underground literary magazine 3:AM. Overnight they appeared to lose 12 years of archived material, including original fiction, reviews, essays - and my interviews with Dan Rhodes and Scarlett Thomas. The interviews were old enough that my backups had long since been lost, so it appeared that they had vanished forever.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case. The archive has now been largely restored to the 3:AM site with a separate alphabetized index, and you can find my two articles in the interview listings. Alternatively, if you're chomping at the bit to read my conversations with Rhodes and Thomas, you can find them via the links below:

Fool's Good: an interview with Dan Rhodes
Reality Squared: an interview with Scarlett Thomas

Of course, the entire episode should act as a warning to writers everywhere. Back up your work, cross your fingers - and remember, nothing lasts forever.

(Photo: My own photo of Dan Rhodes taken after the interview, also recently recovered from the sinkhole of server failure.)