{"id":826,"date":"2009-12-11T15:37:43","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T19:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=826"},"modified":"2009-12-11T15:48:27","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T19:48:27","slug":"peter-watts-alert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=826","title":{"rendered":"Peter Watts alert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/\">Peter Watts<\/a> is a brilliant science fiction writer &#8212; I have written about all four of his novels on this blog (<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=213\">Starfish<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=228\">Maelstrom<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=381\">Behemoth<\/a><\/em>, and (at greatest length) <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=522\">Blindsight<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week, returning home to Canada from the US, Watts was assaulted for no good reason by US Homeland Security guards at the border, and charged with a felony for supposedly assaulting a Federal officer. Cory Doctorow has the whole story at BoingBoing, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2009\/12\/11\/dr-peter-watts-canad.html\">here<\/a>. Watts&#8217; own account of the incident is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=932\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Watts was released on bail, and is back home in Toronto, but he needs money for his legal defense. I am going to make a contribution, and I urge all everyone reading this to do likewise. (There are details on how to contribute on the BoingBoing page I cited already).<\/p>\n<p>This is something that could happen to anybody, given how security mania connected with the so-called &#8220;war on terror&#8221; has become so completely excessive and out of control. But it sort of hits home when I see this happening to somebody whose work I greatly admire. (I do not know Watts personally, though I exchanged email messages with him once).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Watts is a brilliant science fiction writer &#8212; I have written about all four of his novels on this blog (Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth, and (at greatest length) Blindsight). Earlier this week, returning home to Canada from the US, Watts was assaulted for no good reason by US Homeland Security guards at the border, and &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=826\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Peter Watts alert&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-personal","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":829,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}