or in our effort to link our Apple
word-processors from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so pleased
by his generous expert help that we named a character in the novel
"Michael Godwin" in his honor.

The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well. His erudition and his
mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent
curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue seemed
the central drive of his life. Godwin had even started his own Austin
debating society, wryly known as the "Dull Men's Club." In person,
Godwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper-brained polymath who could
not seem to let any idea go. On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's
closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium
well, and he became a local board celebrity.

Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national
exposure of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin had
received no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor,
Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page
splash in the front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it was
confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the Secret
Service wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to obscurity.
Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any crime; he
was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an ongoing
investigation--so what? Jackson tried hard to attract attention to the
true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a
position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues.

Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry
Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was a board enthusiast, a
science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a
lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite. Through a coincidence yet more
amazing, in his last year of law school Godwin had specialized in
federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his
own, Godwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and
provided useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board
debate) broke the story again in the Austin American-Statesman and then
in Newsweek.

Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that. As he joined the
growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all
parti