The media ecosystem continued to digest the story of Canadian sf writer Peter Watts's border macedown and arrest last week, with some new spikes of blog activity, and much discussion on threads across multiple sites.

Watts posted a request for a possible witness to contact his legal team. According to Watts, one of the commenters on his site indicated that they saw the event.

The major media pickup yesterday was the political blog Crooks and Liars, which featured the Watts story front page (Until the ongoing craziness in DC pushed it below the fold).

The Facebook group, Against the arrest and beating of Peter Watts, was up to 1,293 members and dozens of posts. There's a bit of trolling/flaming, but also some reasonable dialogue, and a couple of heavy hitters like Kathryn Cramer and David Brin weighing in.

The blogosphere continues to bubble, with a Google search now returning over 6K hits. There's too much good stuff to keep up with and read through it all, but you can click almost anywhere in the search results and you'll find people in thoughtful and passionate discussion.

PZ Myers post at Pharyngula has sparked an active discussion thread. Noted sf author Michael Swanwick has an eloquent post on his blog, Flogging Babel, which focuses on the tail-end of the incident, where police dumped Watts across the bridge in Canada without his coat. Do-Ming Lum has a good wrap at Luminosis.

And supporter Chris Knall put up a information/donations site FreeTheSquid.org, which provides a quick way of locating the PayPal and snail mail donation options. (Watts's pal David Nickle gave the site a shout-out in a post yesterday, so you know it's legit.)

And I'll say it again — if you haven't read Watt's work, you can go check it out on his site, where there's a Big Friendly Button to make donations. As soon as I got my paycheck on Tuesday, I sent what I could, Hope you'll consider doing the same.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.

Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic died recently at 80, the New York Times reported today. Pavic was a brilliant writer who pushed the boundaries of the book, most famously in his Dictionary of the Khazars, a fictional encyclopedia which anticipated many of the themes of hypertext fiction.

Pavic's work was a great source of personal inspiration to me. He was a great writer and a literary visionary.

Resources:
Khazars.com Pavic's web site
Pavic's Wikipedia entry

The story of Canadian sf writer Peter Watt's macedown and arrest last week continues to percolate through the media ecosystem.

Quill & Quire has a good wrapup. Since Watts has done work on a couple of games, Kombo.com pegged it to the upcoming title, Crysis 2. The L Magazine weighs in on the tenuous reality of foreign nationals living in our "beautiful, angry nation." The Winnipeg Free Press ran it in print and online. The HuffPo thread has picked up a few comments; nothing you won't have seen elsewhere if you've been obsessively browsing.

Over in the blogosphere, 2,000 new posts since yesterday. Great wrap at Master of the Hounds, one of the huge number of LiveJournal sites on the case. Dog Blog has a great line, "Maybe the guards thought the references to genetically modified fishmen, posthuman zombies and vampire starship captains were some sort of sophisticated code." (Heh heh. I can only imagine the poor guy assigned to read through his notebook. If you're unfamiliar with Watts's work, that's just the tip of the iceberg...)

Hullabaloo properly points out that "The police state atmosphere in this country has been with us for a very long time, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities." (Hat tip JH for the link) And Daniel Holzmann goes a step further, problematizing the sf community's reaction: "[W]e live in a country with a history of maintaining a system of white privilege, and part of how that system is maintained is that white people speak up when oppression encroaches our privilege, but allow silence to be the voice of complicity when oppression is oppressing people in order to maintain our privilege. When living under an oppressive system, one can actively or passively support it; but one can only oppose it actively."

Update: PZ Myers just weighed in this morning at Pharyngula "When we cross the border, we should be expected to comply with the law…but we should not be required to cower and cringe, nor should we accept any demand of the guys with guns without question."

Update 2: TimesHerald files FOIA request for video. Hat tip nacks42.

Update 3: The LA Times picks it up.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.

In a story in this morning's Globe and Mail, the paper picks up the privacy thread, noting that Peter Watts's laptop had been held by US officials after his arrest at a border crossing last week. The reporter does a nice job hanging a couple of recent quotes from an Obama administration official on the Watts arrest peg. More like this, please.

In the BC online news site The Tyee, fellow sf writer Crawford Kilian picks up the story.

The first LTEs are starting to show up, and TheStar.com has a couple of good ones about the Canadian experience of crossing the border.

And drive time in the GTA this morning might include a squib on the Watts debacle, given what's up on the 680 news web site.

Over in the blogosphere, a Google search for "Peter Watts arrest" now returns 41,300 hits, six times the result from Saturday. Keep circulating the tapes.

Looking to help out Dr. Watts? According to fellow Toronto sf writer David Nickle, there is now a snail-mail address if you want to send checks: "Cheques made out to Peter Watts can be mailed to Bakka Phoenix Science Fiction Bookstore at this address: Bakka-Phoenix Books / 697 Queen St. West / Toronto, Ontario / M6J 1E6." Or you can donate online via PayPal and read some of his fiction here.

Update: Blurb hits Huffington Post (go buzz it up). Also, picked up by one of RI's great local blogs, I Dreamed I Saw Grace P. Last Night.

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.

With over 200 news articles now appearing in Google search results, it appears that there was broad pickup of last night's AP story, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and NYC's flagship newsradio station, WINS. Canadian news orgs include the Toronto Star, which has a beefier piece, with the Globe and Mail and Edmonton Sun just running the squib.

Over in the blogosphere, there is still an order of magnitude more coverage, with 6,000 results coming back in a Google search. BoingBoing broke the story, with Cory Doctorow helping to mobilize support for the jailed writer, and major sf blogs Making Light, io9, SFSignal, and John Scalzi's Whatever providing strong leading coverage.

Among sf writers, fellow Torontonians David Nickle is leading efforts to raise awareness and support, and Robert Ashby, husband of the brilliant Madeline Ashby takes the opportunity to dissect the power relationships (Best line: "Since when did “at least I didn’t get strip-searched and beaten” become our standard of service?"). There are great screeds from Elizabeth Bear, Will Shetterly, and Tobias Buckell.

Of course, you can read Watts' own account here. And here's a link to donate to his legal defense fund (still named in honor of one of the feral cats he rescues from the streets of Toronto.)

Update: UPI moved the story Sunday afternoon. Toronto's sf Examiner posted a nice wrap that I love for its hed: "America once again safe from Canadian dystopian novelists." Long discussion thread at the local paper closest to the action, the TimesHerald. Globe and Mail has a writethru. And there's an update from Watts on his blog from this morning.

Update 2: A followup story quoting fellow Toronto writer and friend David Nickle has been getting quite a bit of secondary pickup.

Correction: Fixed attribution of quote from Madeline Ashby's blog

Full disclosure: Peter is a friend and colleague.

Dr. Peter Watts, marine biologist and science fiction writer, was arrested in Michigan on Tuesday for allegedly assaulting DHS border guards on his way home to Canada, according to published reports. According to one newspaper account, he got out of his car to question the search of his vehicle and was maced and handcuffed when he did not immediately comply with requests to get back in.

Peter is a friend of mine, a brilliant writer, and an absolutely unthreatening guy. I have been workshopping with him every summer for years. Can I imagine him saying something smartassed? Sure. But he is too acute a student of Darwin to get physical with people carrying guns. The good news is that Cory Doctorow helped get legal representation, and Peter is home and safe now, but facing what looks like an expensive legal battle.

Bottom line: He's going to need money. So if you're a fan of his writing, dig deep. And if you're not, yet, go check out his stories and novels. There's a PayPal donate link there. It's very convenient.

Here's some context. From the story on BoingBoing

Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and[...] was released by Port Huron officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He's home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.
— David Nickle, via BoingBoing

Here's how Watts describes the incident on his web site:

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, [...]-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three [...] hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.).
— Rifters.com

A recently posted story in the Port Huron Times Herald has a bit of the police report, alleging that Peter exited the car "angrily" and "became aggressive toward officers" when being handcuffed. According to the Times Herald, the police refused to provide a copy of the report, instead reading it to the reporter.

David Nickle, a Toronto newspaper reporter and friend of Peter's, is also following the story. So is the brilliant sf writer and blogger John Scalzi.

Donate to Peter Watts via PayPal

Update: Making Light on the case. And an update from Watts challenging details in the Times Herald story.

Update 2: Slashdot picks up the story. Thanks @pixelfish.

Update 3: Saturday night, AP finally picks up the story. Noted sf writer Elizabeth Bear posted her letter to her congressional delegation. The #peterwatts hashtag on Twitter is pretty active. For those with the stomach for it, the Fark thread is pretty rich too, with a good mix of "anyone who talks back to cops deserves what they get" going mano-a-mano with the "what is this, a police state" contingent.

If you'd just like a peek into the mind of Watts, here's an old interview at SFRevu. Or maybe read some of his fiction here. Did I mention there's a "donate" link?

"Beam Me Up," a radio show on WRFR-FM in Maine, debuted a version of my Sturgeon-award winning 1995 short story "Jigoku no Mokushiroku" on their episode yesterday. The show (with the first half of the story) is available as a podcast download at Podomatic.com. Big thanks to Paul Cole of WRFR.

Can't wait until next week to hear how it ends? You can read the full text here.

With a day to spare, and just 50 words of headroom, I crossed the finish line of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) at 12:05 this morning, certifying my scrambled manuscript for the alternate history novel "Fist of the Ape," written in the past thirty days. I won't pretend it was easy, nor that it would have been possible without the support of my family, friends, and the awesome Wrimos in Rhode Island and beyond.

I will confess that there was a very bad point this afternoon when I realized that I had counted about a thousand words twice. It very nearly kicked my ass, when I thought I was at 48K and was really only at 47. But with some encouragement, I cranked six thousand words to put this thing to bed.

Thanks to Karen, for putting up with a month of craziness (and for being polite, when reading the manuscript, and saying only "I can tell where you had the flu..."), and Jack, who didn't have as much homework time with daddy. I will make it up to you. Thanks to the gang at the Gibraltar Point science fiction workshop (you know who you are) where I plotted the outline for this book three years ago. And a special shout-out to hazwastegirl, who made writing sprints at the Warren Coffee Depot such crazy fun.

And now, because I have to share, the only marginally publishable copy. (Which is to say, uh, I actually edited this...)

Synopsis: Fist of the Ape

In an alternate WWII, a US weapons expert and his code-talking sidekick pair up with a Russian spy to track down a possible Nazi atomic bomb.

Excerpt: Fist of the Ape

Manhattan, July 28, 1945, 9:40am
People on the streets recalled hearing the airplane first; a big Army bomber from the sound of it, coming in from the East River. They might have looked up, but couldn't even see the tops of buildings in the drifting cloud deck. The plane was clearly over the city, they remembered, and far too low.

In the Empire State Building, the Saturday shift of the Catholic War Relief Board was beginning their work day. Perhaps they caught a rumble of approaching engines; there might have been time for a glance out the window.

Then the bomber emerged from the fog and struck head-on.

Twenty tons of airplane plowed through the limestone facade and exploded into the building; the B-25 came apart in a fireball, sending a hailstorm of wreckage tearing through offices. The workers, a typical wartime mix of old men, teenagers, and nuns, were killed at their desks, crushed or incinerated.

The left engine penetrated the elevator core, sheared cables, and plummeted to the basement.

One heavy chunk of wreckage passed entirely through the 79th floor, blowing an exit wound in the south wall and plunging across 33rd street to bury itself in the top floor of a warehouse.

When the Office of Strategic Service agents arrived, they had no time to listen to witnesses babbling excitedly to the cops, and they had only the briefest glance for the smoking hole in the side of the skyscraper. None of that was important. The debris across the street was all that that was of interest to them.

Lcross impact site. Photo courtesy NASA

At a press conference this morning, NASA researchers with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCross) team announced that last month's impact experiment had produced definitive evidence of water in a shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole.

In a statement posted on the NASA web site, Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist said, "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."

Read more at the LCross site.

The importance of this finding — not just for pure planetary science, but also for exploration — is hard to overstate. Local sources of water would make permanent bases a possibility. Colonies. Domes full of hydroponic plants. A jumping-off point for travel to the outer planets.

And as far as I know, the sf writer to most fully explore this possibility was Robert A. Heinlein, whose character Manny Davis is a Lunar ice miner in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I'm glad I made Jack get up so early to watch what was a pretty anticlimactic impact last month. While it might not have been immediately apparent, that was a huge moment.

In his debut Publisher's Weekly column, sf writer Cory Doctorow talks about his latest digital publishing experiment: A short story collection with a variety of formats at differing price points, from free all the way up to a version with your own specially commissioned short story. He'll be publishing the results (compared to an earlier collection) as a public service set of data on new publishing models.

Hat tip to also-awesome sff writer Nalo Hopkinson (@nalohopkinson) for spotting this.

Full disclosure: I know Cory (@doctorow), and I pay for his books. The FTC can bite me.